I wait next to people I have seen before, but will only intersect our lives as unnoticed spectres, floating in and out of vision, between this world and the next. We all stand in individual solitude.
Capitalism is working as it should, assigning people their value; I am worth something if the free market mechanisms are to be trusted.
Still, some part of me keeps wondering why I walk in search of nothing, along empty streets in the dead of night, the concrete paths lit by dying street lights, wishing to wake up as someone else. Someone smarter, or taller, or remarkable in some aspect of life. Any singular aspect, for I am unremarkable in everything I have ever done.
There was no freedom in anything. Highschool led to even higher school which led to the workforce, which led to corporate ladder climbing. Even in death there was no freedom, taxes and levies weren't going to pay themselves, funeral parlours had a profit margin to maintain at the end of the day. All anyone was ever trying to do at any given point was to stay alive, as comfortably as possible.
I sit in the pouring rain, slumped against blank advertisement slots on the side of bus stops, an empty canvas, slightly cracked. The darkness drags on for years, as I emaciate while waiting for the bus, a voice, a text message, a call, a sign, from anyone, anyone, to let me know I'm not alone.
I now sit cross legged in the middle of the street just outside the bus stop, waiting for a vehicle to come and run me over, but the roads are devoid of mechanical beasts. There are no voices, just me, sitting upon lifeless cracks in the bitumen.
I waste away as the street lamps continue to atrophy, casting shaky, jagged points across the pavement, a black sheet full of light and shadow, sound and fury, silence and apathy.
The phone I clutch slowly crumbles, as I grasp the buckling plastic frame with bony fingers, worn thin by age. I hunch over, my back to the sky. The shattered screen failed to function long ago. I still hold it tight, waiting for a miracle, for Godot, anyone.
I am a statue, living shovelware. I am the forgotten program, unused and archaic, unsuited for this brave new ecosystem. In this rapidly evolving world I was abandoned by my creators, left as a window to an esoteric era, a fever dream of decades past, a time capsule containing nothing. Mere conceptuality. Abstraction. Organic vaporware.
I watch the world decay like me. The buildings are reduced to bare brutalist geometry, barren and raw. Vines creep along the walls, slowly suffocating and choking the empty brick towers. Soon, the trees tower over the stunted buildings which are no more than fragments of rock leaning against each other, the roofs collapsed long ago. A hollow wind blows across the road where weeds have now sprouted, tender green shoots point skywards, the edge of the asphalt bulging from swollen roots where trees have started to reclaim territory, centimetre by centimetre, year by year. Man's works have all been uprooted, disintegrated, reassimilated, erased. There I lie, a bare skeleton, my bones gnawed on centuries ago by creatures long extinct.
Strange creatures roam the canopied earth, small mammals scavenge for dead flesh, fungi bloom in the moist shade. I sleep under a blanket of soil, feeling the feet of creatures press through the dirt onto my powdered bones. Birds call far above, eating fruit and each other, perching upon distant branches. Smaller plants struggle to thrive, strangled by vines and suffocated of any sun by endless layers of outstretched hands of leaves, thirsting for measly drops of light. The fittest, the strongest, reach skywards.
The sun expands outwards, the herald of the apocalypse announces her arrival. Red flares lick the rocky surface, where my body now lies atomised all over, in rivers, in streams, in mountains, in caves. The miniscule sphere is swallowed whole by an insatiable hole in spacetime.
The supernova scatters its own ashes into the far reaches of the universe, flinging me into distant galaxies, other stars, unseen planets, pastel nebulae, luminous pulsars. I see everything, my dust bears sole witness to the overwhelming emptiness.
The bus finally arrives. A faceless driver gestures mindlessly to the seats, which are all vacant. Dusty and blue, covered in stiff fabric. I look down at myself and I am the person I was an eternity ago, flesh disguising the skeleton I really was. The bus begins to move, and I am certain this is the sign. I cannot see any other people, no-one waits at any bus stops. The ride goes on forever, to nowhere, and I have no intention of departing from this seat.
