Life Sucks

Life sucks. As my eyes stare idly through the TV, the walls creep closer and closer. Simon, from American Idol is yelling some nasty comment, but my mind is reluctant to indulge and interpret his words. Microscopic particles float through the air from the hamburger patty cooking in the kitchen, find their way to my nose, and cause nerves to fire. But the smell is getting weaker.

Before long the singing and applauding and rambling from the TV has become mere noise—noise that now makes as much sense to me as chopsticks to C-3PO. My eyes see only a collection of pixels: nothing more than a 2-d array of varying electrical impulses from the rods and cones on my retina. Smell, taste, and touch have all been forgotten.

Outside world forgotten, my mind begins to wind itself inward. It starts with the most recent memories, the most vivid images. I taste the cheesecake I had had for dinner. Its texture is thick, and smooth, and the strawberry topping interact with my tongue in some way that results in a serotonin burst somewhere in my head.

I remember speaking with Elle on my way back from class. I see us talking to each other, and I hear us speaking, but the words don’t make any sense. Elle looks behind her, I see myself glance down at her breasts and quickly back to her face as she turns her head back around.

Now I’m graduating from high school. Next I’ve just started high school. I just had my first kiss, my first hamburger. I’m a child now, and I’m crying because I spilled my Kool-aid all over myself.

My mother holds me, now. I’m just a baby. I’m thinking about how nice it feels to be in her arms, and how her body’s warmth flows through me. I just don’t know the language to tell her how much I love her.

By the time my memories have been exhausted, my mind has already begun to tumble down a slippery slope. For the moment, I’ve caught myself on a ledge. Behind and above me lies my life, and beyond that I can see the vague details of the future. Before me is a steep drop, the bottom of which is out of sight. I take one last look back and step off.

I realize now, when it is too late, that I’ve left behind the real world. I’m falling away from American Idol, from my room. I’ll never smell the burgers burning on the stove, or feel the heat from the flames as they consume me with the rest of my possessions.

For ages, I fall through darkness. Is this the darkness before I was born, I wonder.

Finally, far below, a glowing ball of light appears, flickering in brightness. As years and years pass, the ball slowly grows larger and larger. After a millennium I start to see that it’s not a ball, and after another thousand years I can see that it’s a series of millions of nodes, firing balls of electricity from one to another. I’m falling towards a super computer no smaller than Manhattan, and when I finally arrive my descent slows and I land on one of the nodes. When I touch it though, it’s ambient light dims and goes out. The death spreads rapidly until what was once a glorious ball of light becomes a system of dead masses.

I’m dead now, I know, so I leap from the dead mass beneath me and fall away, off into the darkness.