Prologue.

Youth.

It is but a fleeting moment in our short lives. A period that comes and goes like a flash of lightning amidst a dark and stormy night.

One moment you’re in your prime, living life freely without the slightest care in the world. You’re filled to the brim with those naive innocent thoughts of love... but the next thing you know, you’ve reached adulthood and the world turns into a shit-stained dreary mess. It becomes a place where love is nothing more than a sham, a delusion of convenience that you’ve been lied to about all your life.

Perhaps one day... you find yourself in my shoes at the age of forty. The light in your eyes fading to black. Your head hanging down low like a puppet with its strings cut… Slowly… but surely, losing all sense of self, you listlessly stare at each individual crimson droplet that drips down the knife plunged straight through your chest onto the cold floor beneath you.

As your body loses its strength and the last of its warmth, your entire life flashes before your eyes. You try to understand how you arrived at this bizarre final destination, but cannot comprehend it.

In elementary school, you recall the times you were bullied.

In middle school, you remember how you closed your heart off from the world and gradually gave up on trying.

In high school, you avoided anything and everyone, you focused only on your grades and the minor little hobbies you had.

In university, you wasted your time on those bullshit promises of a fancy high-paying job at the end of your long winding path of eternal suffering and damnation.

Once you arrive at your final destination, not that job of your dreams, you find yourself in a prison. A cage where they shackle your body in chains and transform you into an obedient dog on a leash. At such a place, allegedly, you can say you are proudly part of society’s workforce. An environment where you’re surrounded by unfeeling creepy masks, with fake business smiles painted on, devoid of any semblance of human emotion.

In the end, the expectation is for you to now contribute back into that shitty clockwork system to turn unsuspecting children into fellow adults incapable of love. Just another clone of yourself, what you have become. One who only knows of work, and nothing else, as that is what society trained you to be.

Such awful scenes flashed through my mind before my eyes inevitably shut closed for good and plunged the world into unsettling darkness.

Right as those dreary curtains descended upon my forty years in this world, I heard a quiet sigh followed by a murmur close to my right ear, “Haaaah. If you’d made different choices in life, and learned of love… maybe you wouldn’t have died all alone like this.”

Perhaps those final words I heard as the last vestige of life drained from my body were the seductive whispers of the devil who’d reaped my soul post-death.

As to whether or not those words had truly been said to me in my final moments… they may have been nothing more than a figment of my imagination.

When did I truly die?

Was it this very instant?

Or… was it… a long time ago?

If… the latter… just when… was it?

Eventually…

...

Even these…

…

Final stray thoughts…

...

Ceased...