This is my experience. This is my world.
Actually, I think that the silence at least is rather a good thing. It highlights my perfect solitude. Nothing survives out here. Alone with one’s thoughts. Free, at last, to think what one wishes, and follow those thoughts, finally, to some sort of real, uninterrupted conclusion.
A little slice of heaven in this otherwise perfect hell.
Or so it seemed at first. I am not so certain, now. I cannot be certain how long I have stood here: an hour; a day, one hundred years. Or perhaps I simply lack the psychic depths to which I had once attributed myself, privately. Whichever of those is truly the case, I now find myself bored. I have seemingly exhausted every thought I think I ever had, and now lack for any kind of diversion in this otherwise featureless locus. The only thoughts I now entertain concern my perception of and reaction to my environment. Which, as I have already stated, is something less than stimulating.
Oh dear.
Where once I contemplated the very bounds of existence, I now find my existence bound entirely in the experience of heat and chafing. It is a sort of inveigling agony, all the more torturous for its mildness.
There is no triumph in enduring this hateful desert.
How long can such an experience persist? Is this eternity? Is this life? Or simply my life? Is there a quantifiable difference between “life” and “my life?”
In this perfect solitude, I do not know if these questions can ever have resolution; I am screaming into the void, and it will not scream back.
