It was a beautiful, dark night. The sleek car moved near silently through deserted country roads, its two inhabitants quiet, one sleeping while the other drove.

The driver, an Italian man called Guilio, kept his eyes firmly on the road though they occasionally flickered up at the vastness of the heavens, as if his thoughts could be found somewhere above. 

His companion, an English woman called Sarah, stirred from her sleep, her head pushing up gently from the window, her eyes glancing briefly at the blackness in front of them, then across to Guilio, and they and her mouth smiled. 

She yawned demurely. “How much longer?” 

Guilio glanced at the tracker though he knew the answer. “Soon - we’re almost there,” he said. 

Sarah was busy unscrewing the cap of her water bottle and swilling some tepid water. 

“I quit my job,” said Guilio. 

Sarah turned to him, shocked. “When? Why?”

Guilio smiled wanly. “A couple days ago. You know why.” 

Sarah shook her head. “I. Um. No - what?” 

He looked across at her briefly, amused. “We talked about how much time the work was taking up. How I was never home. Remember?” 

“Oh. But - what will you do for a job?” 

He gazed easily at the road in front of him. “I’ll find something. You were right though, the work was having a detrimental effect on me - on us.” He reached across and touched her arm. 

She reciprocated after a moment. “Sorry, I was just surprised. That’s great,” she said, rallying a smile for her partner. He watched closely, disappointment showing on his face if she had taken a moment to look back at him. 

He took out a mint and popped one in his mouth before offering the packet to her. She declined. 

Stolen novel; please report.

“Shall we listen to something?” 

“I’ve been enjoying listening to my own thoughts for a while now,” he said. 

She nodded. “Does that mean you want to continue that?” 

“Could I share some of them with you?” 

“Of course,” she said, clicking open her phone and beginning to scroll. 

He withheld a sigh. 

“I’ve been thinking about my own goals recently - what I’d like to accomplish in the remaining time I have. One of them that I’ve had since I was a boy was to write a novel.” 

She made an agreeing noise. He knew that she too harboured similar ambitions - quite a few people in fact had this idea of one day writing a book about their lives; nearly all of those people never would realise it, or come to understand that the mouse they believed they would one day face down and conquer was in fact a lion, and would decline the challenge meekly. 

“But what to write about - that’s the question, isn’t it?” he could sense her nodding assent. “And so I began to think through the types of fiction I enjoy - sci-fi, fantasy, comedy, slice-of-life, drama, historical fiction, horror, and so on. Each one has its attendant tropes, but nearly all have something in common: a conflict that the protagonist must overcome. And so I began to think of what kind of conflict the protagonist could potentially face.”

Here, he couldn’t help but sigh as he continued. “There, I hit a brick wall, so to speak. Because every obstacle to me seemed cheap, fake, boring - done to death. Finding love, beating the bad guy, saving the world, rescuing his family, all that stuff. It didn’t matter which motivation I could come up with - none of them felt to me motivating enough to write about.”

Sarah had put her phone away while he had been talking and sat looking at him as he spoke. “You don’t need to do any of those things. You could write whatever you want - those are just guidelines, aren’t they?” 

He nodded. “True. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to wonder what there was worth writing about. I was listening to a science podcast while you were asleep and there was a discussion over other lifeforms in the universe. Did you realise other, higher life forms may not even be sentient - that what’s possibly the biggest stumbling block in humanity from progressing to a higher level of civilisation is our sentience? 

Meaning there might be a more advanced species of life form out there that’s the equivalent of an ant colony, in terms of how it operates as a collective rather than individuals grouped together, and that humanity will never reach that point because we’re aberrations of nature. That’s why we’re the only sentient life form on our planet compared to the millions that aren’t. 

And I thought: how nice. Don’t you think it would be freeing to not have to worry about the sad little details of our lives and live out our existences in harmony with others? All the petty squabbles of our political differences, how we accumulate status symbols to feel superior to others, the illusion of advancement in our lives - jobs, houses, families - just to make ourselves feel better. Affairs too. The silly jealousies of who sleeps with whom, as if any of it really matters.” 

He paused and glanced across to Sarah who was patiently listening to him. “Sounds like quite a podcast,” she said finally, giving him a wry smile. 

He looked back at her. “I’ll email it to you.”

The GPS announced that they would be arriving at the destination in five minutes. Sarah began fussing with something in her handbag and Guilio said something quietly that she asked him to repeat. 

“Never mind. I’ll - I’m going to drop you off at the house and then I’m going to turn around and drive back.”

She made her demands of why and was he alright and what she should tell their friends and he shook his head, and simply said he didn’t care. 

“I’m going to look at the stars,” he said. 

After he left Sarah fuming at the entrance of the house, he drove back through the darkness in silence once more, looking forward to receiving, in one form or another, at some point, the inevitable and all-consuming embrace of oblivion.