I woke up face down on the sidewalk. I was in front of my friend Alex’s apartment building.
I felt like I was dying. My head was pounding, my body was aching. It was the worst hangover I had
ever felt in my entire life, and I drank a lot. It was a Tuesday morning, and the streets were
unusually quiet. I didn’t think much of it though. The only thing I could think about
was my constricted, throbbing, heavy, liquor inflicted body feeling like it
was dissolving away with my essence, demanding and screaming for my sole attention to hold onto it.
I walked back to my apartment and tried taking a shower, but the water seemed to
almost just go through me. I didn’t even feel the wetness. I became so weak and unsettled,
I collapsed. I crawled out from the bathroom and into my bed and tried falling asleep. I
had never felt like I needed to sleep forever as badly as I did in that moment, but I couldn’t.
It seemed like there was almost a mechanism blocking me from doing so. I always had a hard
time sleeping, but not like that. I felt so unbearably tired yet completely awake,
like I was drifting off into another state but was unable to close my eyes and let go of this one.
After giving up and basically just staring at the ceiling for some obscene amount of time,
I called Alex to ask about what had happened the previous night and then see if he wanted
to get some food. He didn’t answer. I figured he would call back within an hour or so, so I waited,
but after I sent a couple of texts and after an hour passed with no response or call back,
I decided to just go by myself. I was used to that anyway.
It was at a red-light at an intersection a couple blocks down the street when it suddenly
hit me—the moment I realized for the first time that something was actually wrong. As I sat at
that intersection, waiting for the light to turn green, after staring out the driver-side window
and noticing it, I quickly turned and looked out the passenger-side, then my rearview mirror.
In every direction, I did not see a single person or car being driven anywhere. Almost every day
on my way to contract jobs I passed through that intersection, and almost every day,
no matter what day or time, it contained at least some people and some traffic. My mind
attempted to run through all the possibilities and explanations, ultimately rationalizing
that there must be or had been an event that cleared out the area that I was not aware of.
In some sense, I believe I was right about this, but not at all in the way that I thought.
I anxiously continued to the where I was going to get food. When I arrived, the parking lot appeared
to be filled with parked cars, which quickly relieved me. But when I went in the restaurant,
even though the door was unlocked, there was no one inside—not only no customers,
but no employees. After shouting out for someone multiple time with no response,
I began to panic. I rushed back outside, through the parking lot, and into the street.
I spun around, looking in in all directions. The streets, now almost fogged over with a
haze I hadn’t noticed before, were completely deserted. I took off running, looking into cars,
stores, restaurants, and any other buildings I passed, checking inside the ones that were open
for some reason. I yelled out, pleading for anyone, but no one was anywhere to be found.
I soon came to the conclusion that something must have happened, that this part of the city must
have been evacuated or cleared out for some reason. I checked my phone for information,
but it seemed to have no service. I rushed back to my apartment to check my computer,
but the internet was also down. The TV and radio networks weren’t live broadcasting anything
either; the only things on were a few stations playing repeats of really old shows and movies
from maybe around twenty years ago. After briefly collecting myself,
I drove into different parts of the city, different towns, other cities, and other states,
looking for people, for signs of people, for any indication or clues as to what had happened.
I found nothing. And with each new place and each new day, things seemed to only get stranger and
stranger. Colors seemed to become less and less saturated, almost like the world was
dying. At first it was as if there was a hue of a gloomy, overcast day, even while the sun was out,
but then, certain areas appeared to almost become monochrome. And even stranger, by this point,
I barely even reacted to this. The colors of my emotions and sensations seemed to begin to dampen,
reflecting the form of the monochrome, dying world around me. I was becoming numb. My
paranoia and concern seemed to decrease as the strangeness of the situation increased.
Pretty soon, I just gave up looking for answers, turned around, and drove back home.
By the time I was on my drive back, entire areas and once-cities off the highway seemed
to be transformed into just massive white blocks void of any color and texture, like early stage
digital 3-d renderings of architectural designs before any of the details and colors are added.
Once I returned to my apartment, I stocked up on as much food and water as I could
and stored everything in some of the other units in my apartment building.
I don’t know that last time I ate or drank anything though. I don’t really feel the
need to anymore, and the need seems to no longer even really be a need.
Right now, I sit, looking out my window, watching the world continue to fade,
deforming down into white, textureless blocks, and more recently, into a flat white landscape lacking
increasing amounts of 3-dimensinoal depth. It appears to be encroaching closer and closer on me.
I feel so numb. It’s strange because I think the same thoughts I’ve always thought, but they don’t
feel like thoughts. It’s as if my feelings no longer understand the language I am thinking in,
and it’s like hearing someone say something plainly in another language. It means and
feels like nothing. The only thing I can seem to feel is a strange sort of longing—an almost
rationalized desire to feel again. In my current state of emotionless candor, I have thought about
and realized a lot. Before I woke up on that concrete sidewalk, I don’t know how many times I
had thought about ending it. I was ready to let go of everything. I despised most of it. The people,
the things, the things people do, and the things that happen to people. The way the world spun
and demanded that your head spun with it. The dissoluteness and depravity. The deceit, of self,
of others, of the world. The beliefs and the beliefs in no beliefs. The noise, the chaos, the
fear, the uncertainty, the sadness, the conflict, the cruelty, the difficulty, the love, the lack
of love, the heartbreak. The imaginary goal posts constantly being moved away from you, your hopeful
self still too afraid to admit that even if you score, it won’t really change the outcome of the
game. The single car alarm that sounds at just the wrong time. The thinking and the feeling.
And yet, now that it’s almost all gone, I’ve found myself missing it. All of it.
Of course, I miss the colors, the smells, the tastes, and the simple things I liked. But also,
some of the same things that made me want to no longer exist, I deeply miss now that they don’t.
I’ve realized as the world has been chiseled down and taken away from me, the significance of each
little chunk. The desire for life requires so many undesirable aspects. And what we dread is often
part of what we would miss if we lost everything and could still be around to know about it.
In the day-in and day-out of existence, I got so caught up in each moment of each experience,
in my singular, pessimistic, myopic view, I neglected to ever really step back and
realize this—each piece’s significance to the whole and that the whole
is so much greater than the sum of its parts. I think I’ve figured what is happening. I’ve
mostly accepted it now. There is no other explanation. The last clear memory I have
of the world before is me sitting on that roof with that bottle. Some decisions you can never
do anything about after you’ve made them. I only wish I could’ve seen then what I see now.