After midnight

Punishing the poor is the way forward. It always has been.

After midnight, the surreal sets in. Apparently rowing means that all nighters aren't quite what they used to be. Where's the coffee and the coke? No Red Bull for me, never could stand the stuff, except when that guy who lived in a loft in New York was buying us Jäger Bombs and drinking them and listening to his stories about polyamory and excess were the cheapest way to get drunk. Do you remember that night?

The library lights strangely on, and the sensors can somehow tell I'm here, even though my only movement are my fingers sliding across the keys; will someone review my salary please? Connections, connections. A dead mouse in the salad and Leicester City winning the Premier league somehow all result in me being here today, writing this. Can you tell?

It's dark outside, but at least it's not raining, or I don't think it is. Should I go home? The story is eternal and the questions are endless, but worry not, we'll give it our best shot. Become lonely cowboys... will we be lonely if we have each other? I never wanted to be a cowboy. Maybe an astronaut. For some reason, as much as death terrifies me, dying lost in space would somehow be meaningful. Have your body keep moving for minutes, days, weeks, years. Maybe for all eternity, or maybe just until it was pulled into a mysterious planet, maybe one with shallow seas, where the ancestors of the ancestors will slowly decompose me, not knowing, never knowing. Do bodies decompose in space?

I have a story about a girl who loves her brother who hates her. How can I write that? I have no brother. I am not a girl anymore. I do not understand fire, though maybe I do understand water. Who writes our stories? Who will write them if we don't?

Do you believe in... anything? Starts and space, that's all, but do you even believe in those? Do aliens terrify you? What does it mean most science fiction is bad?

I've been listening to the same five songs on loop for the past 10 hours or so. I can't say I'm bored or annoyed by them. They have become as familiar as the silence, as the sound of the keyboard or the fluorescent lights. The songs are home, a space that is mine and that only a few may understand. What is home? Home. Home. Home.

The story goes like this. It always goes like this. It starts and it continues and you only realise by the time it's too late, it's gone and there's nothing you can do to change it. Do you wish you could have changed it? Could you have made it better? I can breathe. I can walk and eat. I can sleep, but maybe not tonight, sleeping tonight would be wrong, it would be more reasonable to stay awake, sleep tomorrow, or after, or hereafter, or never, never sleep. Dreams are for fools and life is for dreamers. Hope is inevitable, the last frontier, the last thing we lose. The last thing one loses.

Technical tehcnological tehcnicalities actually actualise. Technical, tehcnological, technicalities. Technically technical. Techtonical? Achaete. A word. The Scripps spelling bee. A bee, on a flower, buzzing happily in the sun until the child swats it, hard, with its open hand, smiling, happily enjoying its own cruelty. It doesn't last. The sting shocks and then hurts and joy turns to fury and pain and the other child smiles cruelly, taking revenge for the bee in some twisted way. Because children are honest and twisted. Twisted, twisty, two. Two. Two, two, two. Take it or leave it. Do we kill the ones we don't like? Or just banish them and let them die on their own? Will cruelty be allowed?

Arched. Old. Ancient. Pillars. Climbing. A hill. Steak. Always with the protein. Too late. And it emerges slowly, humming quietly if such a thing is possible, holding the tune effortlessly, even though it is the only impossible song, the one that took us by surprise and separated us and destroyed us and sentenced us to never meet again and made us feel like we had lost something. Have you lost something? Is it better to be alone or to be hurt? Are those the only options? The story continues.

A man ties his shoe laces. He has left his cane next to his right leg, which is bent in a right angle, in front of him. He is kneeling on his left leg, therefore. It is the laces on his right shoe that he is doing. Is he blind? Maybe that's why he has the cane... but he picks the laces so deftly, surely he cannot be... but then, the child is able to tie its laces without looking, just by feeling the white and the plastic and edges. Edges. What is the edge of a line? The edge of a point? Long long long long long long long long long. We live with phones dying but hate it when we die ourselves.

Emerge lightly. Tell the story you came to tell, or another one, it doesn't really matter. The rest of them are only here to listen, and the content doesn't really concern them. That's His concern, maybe, if He wants to make it His concern. Who is He, you ask? Nothing but a man, someone who believes in himself.