Feeling pensive.. and no i was not on drugs when i wrote it
Today I was walking. Today I looked around and I saw everyone for their whole entirety: “They are all just little people,” I thought, “Milling about frivolously in their little lives, ungrasping of its furtive largeness. I look at them all, so small, so frail, so two-dimensional… briefly, the cliché occurred to me that maybe – possibly – I’m the one that’s small and two-dimensional, a cardboard cutout flapping around, carried by a gust of wind down a rain swept sidewalk of a busy street as they all step over me, or on me, sometimes tearing me or getting my face stuck to their soles – but I do not believe in clichés, they are a thing for the silver screens of Hollywood glamour. I stood there at the curb, waiting for the friendly white ‘WALK’ sign to blink on, feeling more poisoned and lost with every moment, nausea filling every pore until I was forced to lean on a lamp post. After an eternity which spanned only seconds, the light changed, but I did not move, the world pivoted around me and I could see not in a cone, but in a sphere, a globe, I saw them all, and I heard their thoughts. I heard their woes and sorrows, their promiscuous thoughts and their darkest secrets – I was not amused. I knew then the answer, the one answer to answer all questions. I had to smite them all, demolish their existence and their memory. I looked, stared at a woman in clanking high heels walking past me, stepping onto the crosswalk. She slowly faded as she crossed the stretch of the street, disappearing with not so much as a wisp of smoke as symbol that she had ever indeed existed – no one noticed. So I started smiting them, smiting them all, one by one… and I thought, “Wonder if this is what god feels like?” What if they are praying to me, worshipping me, giving praise to me… and I just can’t hear it? So do I smite them all? A man in a lightly striped business suit stepped out of his car, he looked important, he was walking towards the town inn, wondering what he was going to tell his wife. I like to think that when he touched the door handle that he felt the chill of death – “Just Deserts” is what I would say, if I believed in clichés. It was dark, then, I was still holding onto the lamp post, but the street was empty, “all gone”, I thought… every last accursed one of them. One of whom? I laughed to myself and just as the light turned orange and the letters spelt out ‘DONT WALK’, I stepped onto the soft pavement, noticing it for its usual putty-like property, and started to cross the street, thinking, “Nothing like souls to warm the pits of hell enough to heat the pavement up under my heels.” With each step, the ground beneath me gave more and more, I was in up to my ankles, and I stumbled, sinking deeper. I began to crawl, every inch of me burning as I went, I had to get to my destination, though I could not recall what it was, and so I sank. Into the darkness. Alone, in the middle of the empty street. My last thoughts engrained permanently into my burning brain, “I burn as cardboard burns, no one will remember me, no one will know.”