Pages

Friday, December 2, 2011

Paramour, Part 1

Okay, Christmas is here early! Today, I conked out on my computer while surfing Facebook, I had the world's strangest dream. Like Stephenie Meyer, I had to write it down, and it took the form of a short story. After finishing it, I came up with a number of titles, but I eventually settled on one that thought fit.


So my Christmas present to you will be the posting of my short story, titled 'Paramour'. Since it's six pages long, I'll post it in bearable segments (I wrote it almost as a stream of consciousness piece, so it may get a little monotonous if read all at once) every few days. For me, this was a nice reflection on the meaning of things, and thought it would be nice if I shared it with my audience.


So, without further ado. . . Paramour!









Paramour
It happened one day while I was on Facebook.

I was sitting at my desk, staring blankly at the computer screen waiting for someone, anyone, to post a status update. My cursor was seemingly perpetually stuck over the refresh button, and a half-eaten bag of Chex Mix sat in front of me, along with some lukewarm chocolate milk. My dead-eyed, desperate attention to the screen was akin to that of a zombie. To this day, I still have a working theory that if there ever is a zombie apocalypse, it’ll be because social media has eaten our brains, not other zombies. The end result is naturally an entire zombified population stuck in front of their computers, staring into the screen like it contains their world.

But that’s besides the point. On this particular day, I sat mindlessly clicking the refresh button every 27 seconds, hoping someone would post something that would light up the dopamine receptors in my brain. This hope went unanswered, yet I still persisted, just as I had persisted for the last few hours. I was vaguely aware something was wrong with me, but I wasn’t quite sure what it was, and it didn’t seem important enough to distract me from my devotion to Facebook.

On approximately my 2,854th click of the refresh button, the wall beside my desk just kind of ripped open like notebook paper stabbed by an errant pencil. Through the rip there was a vast blue abyss, an unfathomably endless terrain of shifting colors and textures that went on for as far as the eye could see. I stared at it. Perhaps my senseless, constant, and inane clicking of the refresh button had worn a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum.

At any rate, I finally shook myself out of my daze, tore myself away from Facebook (though not without clicking the refresh button one last desperate time) and approached the rip in the wall. Peering in, I trepidatiously entered the rip in the wall, leaving my dorm behind.

Within the ethereal abyss, I found myself floating aimlessly through space, time, color, texture, and homework assignments. The last item of those five quickly faded as I drifted away from the rip in the wall. Alone in a vast void of uncertainties, I wondered what the grand purpose of this hazy existence was.

At length, I crossed some unseen barrier into the universe as we know it. Drifting in the emptiness of space, I wondered how in the world I managed to survive when there was no air to breathe. I was busy contemplating this question until I was treated to a panoramic view of a spiral galaxy, all the stars and nebulous clouds of gas constituting a strangely fascinating sight that was sadly beautiful. In an instant of melancholy fatalism, I reflected on the fact that not even galaxies are eternal and they, too, after trillions of years, eventually grow old, turn cold, and die.

As I continued floating through the great void of space, watching galaxies pass me by, I took to relaxing and enjoying the view. If, by some unfortunate chance, I had stepped out of my place in time and space and was now stuck as an eternal wanderer of the cosmos, I reflected that it wasn’t that bad of a fate. There were worse ways to go. I recalled a news story about a guy that slipped in the shower and hit his head, then bled out while waiting for 911 to come. Did you know that on average, a pizza will reach your house quicker than an ambulance?

Image Detail
"The Ethereal Abyss. . ."

3 comments:

  1. And it gets to your house faster than an ambulance (on average). Says something about our health care system when food delivery is more efficient than emergency services.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm glad I read this post. Made me want to keep writing my book tonight even though its late and I wanted to quit.

    ReplyDelete