“Writing in the second person is pretentious” – said I.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
There’s a city in the distance; it is a blasted steel spire of pipes and hydraulics surrounded by slums, and the slums are surrounded by desolation, and you know its name. Its name is Hearts. You do not know how you know its name, but you do. Aside from the city in the distance, you are completely alone, walking through a forest of mighty mushrooms meandering magnificently between the amethyst sky and you. There is nothing moving just past the corner of your eye, nothing follows you. Nothing whispering cool breath at the back of your neck, and it certainly isn’t getting closer. There is nothing there, nothing at all, nothing but you and the mushrooms and the mist, and down the rolling hills to Hearts in the distance you see no one, for nothing could live in such a place as that, tainted by some dark presence, perhaps even the city itself. Curiosity is not your friend but in this place it is your constant companion.
Now it is night, and the sky ripples and flows like the surface of the ocean when seen from fathoms below. The fungus disappeared twenty-four words ago and it has been replaced by, floating in the seas above, luminescent creatures of insubstantial biology and pulsating nature. These jellies cycle through the full spectrum, casting all around you in a delightful glow that plays beautiful colours across your red dress, the one your boyfriend gave to you on your thirtieth birthday… Your husband? No. Ex? You can’t remember. A man. Some man. Or was it? Maybe you bought it yourself, it all seems so unclear. As the light of the fantastical creatures above defines the empty path down to Hearts, still distant, felines with large eyes and small noses bound and caper around your ankles, mewling for attention and rubbing against your calves. You pause to stroke one and it purrs appreciatively before frolicking off into the distance, reluctant to cross into the crunching azure leaves that are now set at your feet, a cobalt carpet leading down and winding toward the despair that spreads like a cancer from Hearts itself. You move forward with childlike wonder counterpointed by adult trepidation, and it begins to rain around you, always missing your head. The sound of the falling water on the cerulean sea is as the sigh of a goddess, and though you are grateful the precipitation is avoiding your face you stretch out your bare arms to your sides, palms facing upwards, so that the rain may caress them.
But yet, it grows hotter now. A burning, beautiful, bright hot blazing breath of a brilliant brazier hurtled into your face as if from a great height, and you have stepped into the wasteland. Now the sky is replaced by an endless white nothing, and the nothing that was following you seems to have caught up. You turn back but the leaf sea, the jellyfish clouds, the giant mushroom meadow… all are gone to your eyes. All that remains is the misery that surrounds Hearts, and all roads lead to the centre. The city wants you to come to it. To return to it.
The child in you screams. It doesn’t want this. But the adult complies, bowing its head in acceptance. The adult in you knows that this is the only
Au revoir.
Notations & Nihilism 