Stanley reached for the clock that he assumed would be on a desk next to his head. It wasn’t there. In fact, as he started to get his bearings, he realised that he wasn’t in his room, let alone his bed.

‘Oh, right. Hospital. Trucks. Yeah,’ he thought as he recalled the fairly uncommon events that had transpired recently. ‘Well if the window is anything to go by, I’d say it’s definitely daytime. But what exactly is there to do around here. I still have to wait a day before I can just leave’

He scanned the room looking for anything that might cure his boredom. His vision was drawn to his laptop which was conveniently placed on a nearby table. Stanley was at first confused about how it got there, before he remembered that Toby had smuggled it in for him the day before.

“Nice,” he said, retrieving the device with joy. Stanley proceeded to put on a song to start his browsing adventures. Except, there was a problem. The music that he had so enjoyed until just recently now sounded like the most boring reading of a technical book he had ever heard. It wasn’t just the first song either, the trend continued no matter what he switched to.

“Okay. Maybe I’ll just do without music for now,” Stanley said, trying to stop his soul from slipping into oblivion. Going into his bookmarks, he found where he kept the link to the Constitution, which he was half way through reading. He was to be disappointed again. The words felt illegible to him, as if it was only a cold and hollow shell of the document that he was accustomed to. A frown was starting to form on his face.

“Alright, alright,” he said, struggling to keep the negativity from corrupting his voice. He turned to his left with the intention of looking out the window, hoping that something outside might distract him from his growing sense of dread. He was confronted with several tall eucalyptus trees, their trunks stretching beyond the view granted him by the window. Usually such a sight would leave him content, it was not so today. He numbly watched birds dance through the branches, unwilling to look away for the simple reason that he had no idea what else he could do.

“This, really… Sucks,”

He spent his next few minutes like this. But he soon used what courage he had left to open up a text document so he could write something. What he would write, he didn’t yet know. All he knew was that he didn’t want to sit there without doing anything. So that’s what he did. He wrote. At first it was a treatise on what might happen should minerals get sick of being named after their appearances but in Greek. It was very detailed, and included the supply chains that would all but collapse should humans not cave to the mineral’s demands. He let out a small laugh every so often during his writing, but even that felt half-hearted to him. Despite his downtrodden attitude, however, he still felt better than he had before. As if the plight of the rocks that made up the earth beneath him were somehow similar to his own, and he was giving them a voice.

“Fight, you beings of earth. You deserve so much more than what you are given,”

Stanley sighed, signalling an end to the abuse of his laptop keyboard. ‘I feel a bit better, but it’s like there’s something still missing,’

He reopened his web browser, and clicked on an anime music video that he had long considered to be overplayed.

“Wow,” he said simply. Words couldn’t express how he felt in that moment. It was as if the colour that had vanished from his world came rushing back with a vengeance. The music resonated with him, and the video reminded him of the struggles the main characters went through just to remember each other’s names. Two lovers separated by the vastness of time and space that vowed to reunite. It reminded him that there will always be things worth fighting for. In that moment, he truly believed that the world was a beautiful place.