Alone in the World

My office block, a cumbersome block of concrete disappointment stood in front of me, barren. The overwhelming darkness pervaded me. Had I gotten up a day early? I pushed the grey depressing front doors and was almost relieved to find them standing sentinel and resistant against my weak efforts to enter. 

I return to my shoebox apartment and squeezed through the little door. The vicious teeth of decay had slowly bit and chewed my apartment up and spat it out until all that was left were the cold unsightly remains of a once snug home. My ancient TV was still buzzing in the corner, casting a dim light over my moth eaten sofa. In the corner, it read “9.37am, 20th of March, 2022.” Confusion, and fear, flooded though me. It wasn’t a bank holiday or a day off, yet my office was deserted and lifeless. When I came to think of it, I didn’t see a single life on my way to work either. I ripped open my curtains, which were held together by threads. Out the window, every car was parked at home, neatly like a child’s toy town. Nothing stirred, nothing moved. Trees did not even rustle in what should have been the breezy March air. The bleak sky was dull and grey.

My phone could hook in no one. I stood for hours calling every number I knew, yet one answer machine after another rebuffed me, and sent me further into an anxious panic. I was alone. 

Out in the street, I listened out for the distant rumblings of a car. Yet louder than all was the rustling of my jacket against my side, and my light, reigned in breathing, which penetrated what was a deafening and eternal silence. My footsteps must have been audible for miles. 

I walked around helplessly searching for anything at all; a fresh piece of gum, or a cigarette still burning at the stub. I found nothing. 

With everyone suddenly vanished, my worry really began to set in. I thought about all the people I may mysteriously never see again. I thought of friends I haven’t talked to in years. I thought of cousins that had moved on to different countries. I thought of my parents, who I hadn’t even called back in a year. Then I inevitably started to wonder if anything had changed. Was I going to miss anyone? I was an idle robot walking to and fro each day, following the rules of society day in and day out without an ounce of passion for my dead end job, nor any deeper connection whatsoever with any of my equally robotic coworkers. I began to wonder: was I now free? Could I now do as I please?

Bubbling in my veins was a new sensation. I felt a rush of adrenaline just considering all of my new possibilities. I felt like God on the first day. The earth was now my sandbox, my garden of Eden. I had to do something right now! But what, I was still unaware. Overburdened by choice, I decided that for the first time in years, I would go to the theme park just an hour out of town. My opportunity to be a kid once more reemerged from the passing of a society that forced me to grow up far earlier than I wanted to. My fossil of a car fortunately still worked, despite being somewhat abandoned in the damp parking lot under my big ugly drab box I, and forty one others, called a home. My work was only a few minutes walk, so at some point the old machine lost its purpose. None of that mattered anymore though - work or my apartment. I could be leaving here for the last time ever. The car was as reinvigorated as I was, and started up on first try, eager for its new life. 

For the first time in my life, I experienced this city at full speed. The motionless traffic was left in the dust with the rest of my dreary past. It was almost a novelty to see lampposts at the side of the road approach my window, speed past my window, then trail behind in my wing mirrors. This was liberation. As I sped onwards, the bleak and gloomy metropolis broke away, and the colourful, blossoming rolling hills.

The green of the countryside healed me beyond what I thought possible. Oak trees surrounded glassy lakes and knolls, gracefully untouched, like a priceless garden. Fantasy books I read as a kid became real once more as I drove under tunnels of arched trees and looked at the smogless winding road ahead. 

The theme park was left untouched by time. My memories of the past and visions of the present became one, and I walked around with my younger self by my side, marvelling at the great white ferris wheel which enchantingly turned like a sideways table top spinner, elegantly and beautifully. The merry-go-round was waiting for me, and I mounted my silver steed. He remembered me after all this time, and rode as smoothly as the day we first bonded. 

I took candy floss out of the vacant stalls, and tasted heaven once more. The taste was unbeatable. Why do adults not eat candy floss? It was a relic of my childhood I almost ceased to remember.

The Space Razor, my favourite roller coaster of the whole park beckoned me. It seemed to be a two-man job to get it going, and I wasn’t sure I’d have time to run to the passenger seat, but with a little engineering involving several broom sticks and sticky tape, I made it work. The cart was off, slowly trotting up the steep track, before reaching the pinnacle. It was the highest point in the park. I could see still green waves for miles and miles. It reminded me of when my father took me here, and I got desperately scared of the upcoming fall to the point of maddening hysteria. So to calm me down before we dropped, he told me a joke. He prefaced it by asking if I knew what an MRI scan was, to which I said no. He powered through with his joke anyway, which went like this:

“Did you know dogs can’t operate MRI machines,” to which I looked at him with the utmost confusion. “But cat-scan.”

He burst out laughing in his deep baritone laugh that was always so comforting to me, perhaps more at my bewildered scowl than the joke itself, and yet I was so confused, wondering if I missed something in the joke that I forgot all about my fear. When the cart finally dropped, I was so caught off guard that I accidentally enjoyed it. 

I went to turn to him in my cart, back in the present, but when I looked left, it was empty. And then suddenly I felt empty. I had no one to share this fun experience with. I hadn’t been sharing my experiences with anyone for years. I got so lonely that I actually got used to not having fun, or not talking to people, and I started to feel that maybe this new overburdening sense of unwanted solitude was punishment for taking the opportunities for granted; for missing every golden moment that life has thrown at me for the last few years. 

The cart dropped and I felt nothing. So joyless was this lonely ride, that I sat bored in the cart looking at my knees waiting for it to finish, without a single knot of excitement in my stomach. 

I walked straight back to my car and sat in it for a while, filled with regret and shame for imposing this self exile from society on myself. I was a drone, stuck in a rut to deep for me to climb out of alone, and yet I had left myself abandoned without help. Without my family. Without love. Without even a friend. My aching heart was starved. The bitterness against society left me, and the resent too. I was just in despair, so painfully aware of my loneliness. A desperate flickering hope stirred deep from within that maybe my parents were still around, and that through them I could find some sort of redemption or way out of this.

The car was a little less enthusiastic when I set off, chugging towards their house. I was scraping the bottom of the tank for the last bits of fuel. Their house was getting so close that I thought I might make it, but the little red machine gave up a mile out. From there, I trekked on foot. Although there was nothing to be felt in the air, I was cold, and pulled my jacket collar up to my neck. 

My old street was like a preservation in a museum, just like the theme park. Every tree was the same height, every garden kept in the same style. My own house was a cosy two story cottage, with exposed oak beams and quaint little windows. The apple tree in the front garden bloomed green, with shiny red balls occupying most branches. The grass was beautifully neat as my father always kept it. Our door was kept in its postbox red colour, elegantly painted, without a single chip or peel. I knocked, with dread and hope, begging for a response. I waited, and heard nothing, so I gave it another knock. There was still nothing. Heavier this time, I knocked, practically begging the door to open and make them appear. I started thumping on it, and my eyes began to water. “Please just let me see them.”

But there was nothing. 

I tried the handle, and it opened without resistance, as it seemed to lack any sort of life. The house was equally bare of people as the outside world. The long mahogany banister in the hallway, lining the stairs up to the bedrooms greeted me as a stranger in my own home. Framed photos of me and my family hanging on the wall seemed not to recognise me. The living room door however was ajar and inviting. I felt it beckoning me. I took my shoes off at the front door, and walked in, feeling the smooth wood floor beneath my feet. Inside the living room, it was hot and stuffy; a fired burned in the stove, and the smell of burning turf met my nose. The dancing flames looked tired, as though they had been going for a long time. There wasn’t much to keep it going inside. I sat on the old brown leather sofa for a moment and sank deeply in, like I did as a small child when I wasn’t tall enough to touch the ground with my feet. The old glass cupboard that housed all the china we never used still stood alone in the corner. My feet guided me over to it on their own accord and I found it impeccably clean, without a single bit of dust on the whole thing. In fact the entire room was still alive. It lived, breathed and had a soul. This was a singular solace from an empty world. In the cabinet below, that housed the old photo albums, a key was still present. I turned it, opening the time capsule. The door swung open to a compact library of books, filled to the brim with memories. I took out the heaviest one I could find, then sat in my mother’s favourite arm chair, which looked out into our wild garden, so that she could watch the birds land on the flowery magnolia tree. 

I opened the first page carefully, as though the memories might slip out of my hands and fall away forever. The first picture was my mother and I, at the beach. I was holding my little plastic trowel that I used to build the most magnificent castles produced by a man and sand. It was when I dreamed of being an architect; I still do. Of course I was too young to be one then, but I always imagined that some sort of great message would come and hit me in the face so obviously that I couldn’t possibly miss it. A message telling me “Go now! It’s time to follow your dreams.” The message never came, and ten years came and went without me even realising. One day I woke up and noticed my life was passing me by. That slowly the future was receding into the past, and day by day I was slowly burning away my remaining time; that one day I’d have none left, and I’d have done nothing with my life that I ever really wanted to do. Yet still I would sit in my cold, dark apartment, wasting away the hours in front of a TV watching drivel that I really didn’t care about, trapped in a state of inertia.

A blue twinge of pain filled my heart. I flicked on, mourning the loss of a life I never had. I landed on a newer picture of me and my last girlfriend sitting under the magnolia tree in my garden bathed in the pink tinted sun. We were seventeen. The photo managed to capture her laugh perfectly, with her pearl white teeth and the creases around her eyes when she smiled, stamps of its authenticity. Although I’m not sure, as I have little to compare it to, I think I loved her. Nine years later I still think about her sometimes. I imagine her in a white dress, spinning like a ballerina under the magnolia tree, bright and golden in the summer sunset. In my memories, she is untouched by time, like a freeze frame. In my memories she still loves me.

I lost her. She didn’t pass away, but she moved to another town for university, and I let her just disappear from my life. She’s doing great I’ve heard, in a fancy managerial position now. Accounting or law - something like that. I’m just glad she didn’t get lost like me. 

I hoped to find joyful reminiscence in the album, but all I found was buried sadness and sorrow. I flicked on past photos of friends I haven’t seen in years, past pictures of me posing for school photos and fairs, filled with optimism and excitement for the world. I wondered what changed, and how I let it all go. 

Finally, I stopped on one picture. It was just me, posing in front of a model train village I made as a boy. Even from the old photo, you could see how eloquently crafted each building was, how much attention to detail there was in every little tree, hill, road and person. Each little figure had their own personality. Some were grumpy, some were carefree. Some were doing their shopping and others were on dates. It could have been a model for a real town. I had spent so much time making it, with real genuine passion. It was the one thing in my life that I felt truly proud of with a real sense of accomplishment. That was the thing that made me want to be an architect. My dad sent a copy of that picture off to a train magazine and they even sent me a letter back congratulating me, with a little conductor badge.

Suddenly, I felt a tear drop onto the photo album. Then more started streaming down my face and I began crying heavily on the book. In that moment I had never been more alone. I just begged anyone who listened that I could have it all back. I apologised with all I had for not cherishing life or grabbing at those moments. Uncorked, all these emotions poured out, turning my stone exterior to real flesh and blood once more as they fell, while a soft, melancholy warmth flowed through me.

Outside, I heard a great rumbling, before a bright flash. The sound of thunder quickly followed, and within seconds it began raining. Heavy, beating rain poured violently against the roof and all over the earth. It seemed to breathe life into all the land, like rainfall after a long drought. A little hare popped out of a bush and scurried across the garden. A robin bobbed about in the rain and took shelter under the magnolia tree, while the sun returned, irrepressibly beaming through the dark clouds. I stood up to look in shock out the window, when the door opened behind me, and my parents walked. As I turned around, we gazed at each other in total disbelief. My dad’s face erupted into a huge smile and he began saying “you finally called! We didn’t even realise you came in-” but I ran towards them and hugged them both as tight as I could, to compensate for all the hugs I had missed over the years. I just held them and cried, and they made no effort to pull away over the whole five minutes I stood there sobbing. 

The rain cleared, and the clouds turned white. The Earth seemed to spin again. Golden sun rays peaked through the dissipating clouds, and painted the trees and grass in a golden light. Birds sang and children played. 

And I became whole once more.