I had that moment you get, just once in a while. You stop in your mind to remember a vision worth remembering. You hold time for a second, rather than be enslaved by its rituals. I watched her walk toward the door and stop and look over her shoulder at me.
Her eyes were natural, they shone, they loved. I felt like someone important for a second.
It was strange because, it was only a few seconds later that the whole sky went dark, literally dark, like an unannounced eclipse, for just a moment.
I thought ‘did I imagine that’ and that’s when I caught the eye of the young mother on the street, clutching her little boy’s hand, she had stopped to look up at the sky. She was sort of gasping. Like I said, it was only a second but the sky had turned dark and then to light again, and it was unexplainable.
That weird moment stayed with me all day. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t know what to say to anyone about it. I went about my business, I worked, laughed, did the things you do every day and then it came to dinnertime and I was looking at her again. This time she was not smiling, she was distracted, almost upset. She had looked so radiant earlier, so alive, so real. I looked at the way she was dressed and groomed. Her hair was perfect, she had lost weight, she had her best dress on and black high heels. I realised in a second, she had been having an affair and that her misery was because she had been let down or dumped. You know someone well enough and you just know. I decided to say nothing. What can you say? We ate and she was miserable and I held my breath, like I would have to for the rest of my life.
I woke up in the spare bedroom. I had purposely had too much to drink so we could be in different beds. It was a single bed, it felt like a total regression to my teenage state of mind. I woke up in the night shaking with alcoholic poisoning. I thought for a moment I saw a dark shadow of a person move across the room. It was so real I sat upright, scrambled for the nightlight and addressed the room: “Who are you?”
Nothing. Just a strange trick of my brain.
The next day at breakfast, she came downstairs, and I sensed her pick up on my vibe. She reached for a hug, and I fell into it. I was numb.
The day was ahead of us both. It was a heavy thought. Our children were now in the kitchen so there was no room to talk.
The fridge door slowly opened. It was odd. The door simply swished open. We stared at it and then each other. It was like a communication from an observer.
When she left that day, there was such a dark shadow over her.
I had this feeling that was so intense. It was that life is not linear. Life is a sphere, a three dimensional puzzle. I felt like the end was already written and decided. It was like a set of predetermined patterns were unravelling like leaves, as if watching an explosion – if you can measure the explosive materials, it’s obvious where the pieces will blow out. Ants, bees, termites – every living thing, has a predetermined pattern in their DNA that makes their decisions for them. You can see the end from the very beginning, you just need to understand the rules of set behaviour.
I found myself on the corner of a bridge. It was a suspension bridge. I climbed up on the railing and thought to myself, ‘I can do this.’ The river was flowing fast below. I put one foot in front of the other. One step, another step. No hands. That’s when I saw the cat.
The cat was black and white and staring at me from the floor of the bridge. Something was wrong with the scene. The cat was wrong.
“I love her, I love my children” I said to the cat. I swear it smiled. I could sense I was going to die very soon. That’s what I expected.
“Program interruption. Prepare to disengage.”
Everything disintegrated. Part of my real brain was taking over, realising.
I removed my virtual reality helmet. I could remember everything, the language, the smell, the paranoid life, the love – such burning love! Being a human being was a strange reality, and I felt privileged to experience it first-hand. They were long extinct now, and fifty years was a long VR experience. I felt human for weeks afterwards, felt the air of ancient Earth, the beauty of human love, the sights and the self-traps, so many frailties of mind. A highly unusual experience. I felt very privileged. It was such a shame there had been a glitch in the code, but then, it had added to the strangeness of living as a human male.
The End
Dystopian Days 