"Hi..." squeaked a stranger meekly, tentatively taking their seat at my side.
"...hi," I replied hesitantly, refusing to open my eyes.
"I'm going to die soon." The stranger said this with such apathy, with such lack of emotion, that I could not prevent a small flicker of anger from sparking within my stomach.
"I know."
"Im going to die, and then the whole world's going to blow up." In my head I smirked. How funny it was that this person thought that they had the privilege of being spared the sight of the world crumbling around them.
"I know that as well." My words became curt, and as much as I hated to admit it, empassioned.
"So essentially, we're all gonna die. "
At this I slid my hands down my face and braved the sight of the world. A sigh of resignation from the young girl that sat beside me indicated that she could not say any more.
For a time after retreating back into my own head, her words bounced around in my false sanctuary, a ringing cacophony that became louder with each repetition. Until I could stand the sound of her voice in my head no longer.
"We?"
She looked up at me from her spell of day-mares, frightened by my voice's shakiness and aggression. The flame which now seared my chest warmed my mind to a boiling point, and suddenly I could not contain the words from frothing out of my mouth.
"There never was any 'we'. Only you. Only me. Each of us took every breath expecting another to follow, and then kept the thought in our heads that, maybe, one day, the day would come when each of us breathed no longer. And now you speak as if we lived together? That our lives were connected!?" I jumped to my feet and lashed out at the nearby rubble as white-hot tears carved scars down my face. "You don't know death! You don't know what it means not to live! all you know is the pains of life, its sufferings and its joys. You never understood that hardships were just a distraction from the true agony of nothingness!"
Her face had not changed from the moment I had opened my mouth. It was only, through tear-blurred vision, when I saw her crumple into a tangled heap of human, that I realized she had died before me.
Somehow, her death brought a calm with it. I looked around the landscape, at the leafless trees and burned grass that desperately clawed at the heavens, at the frenzied birds battling poisoned clouds for dominance of the sky. At my feet, scurrying bugs scouting fresh meat rushed to claim their prize, but none of them had an appetite. Not anymore.
All of this life, I thought to myself. All of this space, filled to the brim with the pains of living. Such is the nature of our world.
As I shed my last tear, and the ground rushed to meet me, as my body numbed and my thoughts slowed, I chuckled. All this time I thought myself solitary. Maybe I wasn't so alone after all. Maybe that girl and I weren't so different. In the end, just like her, I couldn't even live long enough to watch the world end.
ns 18.68.41.175da2
