Experiment #1

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The shadowy walls in my claustrophobic room created a cold and sterile aura about the slow passing of time, I felt I could hear the digital clock on my desk ticking towards another dark day. I froze beneath my sheets and yet the mattress was damp with perspiration, I shivered in a strange dread. I was alone and always had been. Willowy, bright thoughts danced strangely through my tortured mind:

Flashy skyscrapers, the sun casts no shadow. Two people within the mass of humanity crowding the sidewalks suddenly leap into crystal clear focus. A man and a woman. They are talking, and laughing...they seem happy.

A net of darkness is cast over them, over the entire scene. Distantly bells ring, heralding something but I forget what...

She came and now goes. Her image was simply a white light that tore ferociously at the darkness that pervaded my world. I tried to grasp it but there were no tethers to be found. I see that I am running, I am in fact out of breath – and yet the light recedes even more rapidly. As I go faster the glow sees my efforts halved. First gray, then nothing. I feel a receding mass of ones and zeroes laughing quietly. The deafening roar of a chemical rocket fills my ears.

I was helpless before her, and now I was succumbed to misery without any light with which to see.

The surreal vision fades. The time on the clock screamed into my eyes with glaring red numbers, bringing waking time ever closer. Sunrise was a thing of the past, there was no sun. I sit up – back hurts – a black disc speckled with icy points of lights emanates darkness. The blue marble was nowhere to be seen. It did not exist in this reality, it had been left behind and there was no way to return.

I covet the man with his sharpened steel. I covet the lethal radiation safely behind the bulkhead. I covet a disease. I covet the vacuum that waits beyond the door. I want an ending.

Such is the way it shall always be here between the stars. Crawling, creeping. Tens of thousands of kilometers a second and still so far, so long. Such is the cycle of my life as it goes on and on against my own will.

Peace.
Andrew W. 9/98

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