I, In Memoriam

I have been bored for an eternity. 

The years have blended together so that I can barely remember how long it has been, or even how I died.

I was young; I know that much, somewhere in the overlap between child and adulthood. My recollection of my death changes day by day. One day I see my ribs crushed beneath a cherry-red sports car; the next hear the maddening beep of monitors, the next feel cold steel jammed under my chin. I do not even remember if I was a boy, or a girl, or neither. I think I had short hair, and I have a hazy recollection of a small body concealed beneath a lumpy sweatshirt. Or was it a lumpy body and small sweatshirt? Other than those vague details and the ever-shifting false memories of death, my past life is nothing to me. For all I know, it was one long dream

Once, I used to follow people around, searching for some semblance of reality, but there’s only so much you can watch without quickly growing disinterested. Talking, walking, kissing, loving, eating, sleeping, dying. It’s all too predictable. 

Then I used to sneak into places, like theaters, or shopping malls, but those too became the same. Then I would go for walks in the woods; watching the fauna go through their clockwork survival routines, then when I tired of that I would jump from the highest cliffs, but I was always carried safely to the ground. Anything that initially thrilled me would, after centuries of repetition, blend together into a bland beige porridge, like drinking coffee grounds and water after a nice, sweet mocha. Coffee! I used to love coffee…or tea?

For a short time, there was a new fascination, when the forests gave way to blankets of ash and towns were blasted to rubble. I used to run across the fields with my arms out, hot lead sizzling through my misty body. I would watch the war machines churn across the landscape. I would watch as young men and women fell at my feet. I would watch impassively as the light in their eyes faded. I would step over their ruined limbs as the last of their lifeblood bubbled between their dry, cracking lips. When their souls left their bodies, I would always be there. Watching, watching, watching. But none of them ever came to join me.

 I remember one woman lying crumpled against a piece of chimney. She could not have been an adult for very long. Her vest had a massive hole sizzled through the direct center; still she was trying to plug it with a bit of cotton. Just before she gave up, I imagined that she looked at me. The ashes coating her face brought out the blue of her eyes beautifully. I felt the memory of hairs tingle along the memory of the back of my neck. She stared directly in my direction, squinting a bit - though it might have been from the sun - her lips twitched, and then she was gone.

Then came fire from the sky. I used to try and stand in the direct center of them, watching everything around me blaze bright white and disintegrate. Everything.

There were some other people around for a while, but they soon vanished, eaten up by the sand. Afterwards was silence. Maddening, maddening silence. And desert.

The mountains crumbled, the seas gradually rose, then fell, then vanished altogether. So now I walk the sands of time, endlessly. I used to come across the remains of a great building or machine, reduced to rusted skeletal frames, but those too eventually fell to dust.

Some days I simply lay and stare at the sun. It is the only thing to watch in the sky nowadays, now that the birds have gone the way of the people. Mostly I just walk. And walk. I leave no footprints.

This morning the sun is angry. The sky last night was uncommonly bright, no stars to be seen, just a burnt orange ceiling. In the daytime it is not much different. The sun eats up my entire field of vision.

The sand at my feet begins to steam, then melt into bubbling black glass, then turn red-hot. Dunes liquify and come sloshing down, spraying liquid fire through the air. I am in lava up to my knees now, and in the distance, I hear titans groan as my world tears apart.

More ferocious than any bomb that ever burst over my head, the sun balloons into the Earth, turning my vision red and white, and I accept it. I revel in the sounds, the screams of a dying planet.

Then silence once more.

I watch from a distance as my sun, insatiable, gobbles up the matter around it before settling, red and distended, floating in space as I drift. I leave my solar system behind, turning end over end in a bath of stars. I reach out to them, laughing noiselessly. So much to see, and it never, ever ends...

This is the most fun I’ve had in years.