Young Writers Society

Adieu to sense.

____

Slipping dread adorned a dimly lit café, its interior like the sallow skin of the despondent. Cold hate and refuted regret ran down the brick walls in ivy. Sentience was rare, religion died; only [w]reckless wisdom remained.

A fog settled over everything. Sleep condoned the indifferent, self was replaced, love hid away from the world, too frightened to appear. The lack carried a plethora of lies; pathetic and yet effective. The people starved their resolve and blamed one another, claiming ailments and diseases that were never meant to exist. Eventually the world is what you say it is, they forgot their power and broke the chain, throwing away the knowledge that might have healed the sick and fed the hungry.

“I doubt they would have let me. I doubt they would have cared. I doubt my own doubt.”

One; crazy, she sat. Desperate collections of ideas lit nothing; burned nothing. There was no one to tell what became of nothing, for they had forgotten. The ‘definitions’--as she called the common people--had just begun to get out of work and, one at a time, they wandered into the café. Consumption was what she called their disease; for they only consumed. It was in their heads, crawling through their thoughts, licking at wounds they had forgotten. It reminded them that they merely functioned, and nothing else. She leaned back in the decrepit chair, controlling the insanity that made her want to jump and run and break.

The choice of the insanity was the main point. Had she not chosen this world? Had her ancestors chosen it for her? It was one in the same; she carried their blunders and suffered for them, alone. But the others…the others were consumed by their need to consume and the quiet vacuum of ignorance left them with nothing to carry; nothing to suffer and nothing to learn.

“I decided that I won’t decide. I decided that there is no decision. I decided that I can’t know choice from inevitability. I decided that, didn’t I?” she finished thoughtfully, gazing at the crooked ceiling above her.

It was them who spoke in her fevered mind. They were defined; so defined that the lines of their faces and hands never changed; the lines of their thoughts never broke and the line of life ripped them apart when it ended. Their definition clung to itself and lived in the agony of circular arguments that refused to ever end.