Anthony, or tony as the friends he once had called him sat on the wet metal bench, looking on at the water of the Thames. The oscillating patterns of the wave, the rising and falling of its peaks, the shades of blue and grey reflected on the water as the weak London sun played on its surface. They all helped guide his turbulent mind; easing him into a state of semi consciousness where the truths of his reality as he had recently come to know it could not harm him.
Despite the water however, he found the calm fleeting. “Typical.” he thought to himself, why would he be allowed an oasis from the ongoing storm. Though he had always pride himself a strong atheist, tony couldn’t help looking up to the heavens and wondering what exactly he did to deserve such unabating smiting.
“If this is you proving a point, you’re going about it all wrong!” he shouted to no one in particular.
“At this point I’m more likely to carry on out of sheer stubbornness.” Needless to say he didn’t expect a reply. He stood up from the bench, certain he was judged undeserving of what little comfort it provided and walked to the barriers that held bay the senile or foolish from the pleasure of an up close encounter with the Thames. Out of habit he reached for his phone as he stood at the edge. Pulling it out of his pocket, he looked at the black screen, his own dishevelled face staring back at him. With the battery dead the phone was just an expensive, black brick. Gigs of processing power trapped in a dead husk. He could relate. He saw the same waste in his reflection.
“I’m tired of asking why” he said. “I’m tired of being tired.” The rain had stop but his cheek felt wet.
He laughed out loud at the scene. A grown man, crying and talking to himself; a cliché. And that was the worst part of it all. Everything he did in this tortured state was predictable, sad and outright pathetic. In a just a few months he’d lost every sense of who he was. And now he was just one of the many masses that brooded in dark corners, contemplating the one decision that couldn’t be undone. He remembered when he heard of people jumping in front of trains. “How inconsiderate” he had said, “disrupting and traumatizing people just because you feel SHITTY?” The Irony.
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His mind wasn’t made up yet. But he didn’t know why. The logic seemed solid; why keep fighting only to get knocked down over and over again? Wasn’t that a definition of madness? The way tony saw it he was choosing sanity. If only it felt that way though. For all the rational he couldn’t help but think maybe there were other choices. Maybe this didn’t have to be it. But if not, what then? Every day he felt bits of him rotting away. With every breath his hold on himself and soul seemed that more tenuous. He felt he was being burnt from the inside and nothing he had managed to do seemed to be of any help. Not the doctors, not the drugs, not even sex. He was empty, a hollow shell and yet the fire continued to burn. All he had left to give was his plagued life and he was done with it. There weren’t other choices, nothing and no one could help. He had to end it. As he climbed over the railings, his hands the only thing holding him up, he laughed at his last words, “How inconsiderate.”
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In all the infinite universes compounding with possibilities, it might have been foreordained if not utterly random that there would be a place that so quintessentially Differed. Polar to all mundane, a place where light was not opposed by dark, unshackled by the tyranny of certainty. Death an abstract boundary that marks the beginning and end of all cycles. In this formless place a soul persisted known to all but itself. And indeed, there were many to know it. Entities as boundless as the realm they inhabited, a choir of consciousness flickering in and out of being. Unimaginably nonsensical, yet each emitting a hum that though morphing ceaselessly resonated into an eerie refrain. The host if they could be called that, considered the soul newly fallen into their domain. It was another of the broken. One particularly laden with the Dark melody. Even amid Their Grand refrain the deep tones cold and hollow clashed against their harmony, a minor note though it was. The broken where myriad in the Cycle of Songs, many having failed to find meaning, to find rhythm. Yet few came that lost though they were echoed faintly of something more, something different. Still, the soul warped an already tenuous reality, so concordant was it with the Dark melody. If it at yet to find harmony… perhaps a new progression was needed. Even in failure it would only add to the Great Song.