Nothing is Lost

He watched from his window as the seasons changed. There was no yearning in his gaze, just a weary observer looking through glass at a foreign universe. From the tenth floor, Dhaka looked like she was suffocating. The clouds hung oppressively low, drifting serenely on a sea of smog. He watched the people spilling onto the streets. Ants dispersing from a disrupted task. He both pitied and envied their content ignorance. Everything was vying for its space, the buildings, the trees, the waste, all in a smooth film of dust. It seemed only apt that he should, too.

He hadn't been able to pay his bills, so they had cut off the electricity. The sun had crawled back out of the window and he soon found himself in darkness. The sun would come out, go down and come out again, and he measured his life in units of dawn and dusk.

He turned on the blue nightlight and fell back in bed, sinking into quicksand sleep. Unlike his thoughts, his dreams traveled sporadically through worlds and realms. While awake, he thought of little but death. What being buried alive would feel like, slitting his wrists, hanging himself, shooting himself, jumping off a ledge, drowning, burning, overdosing. When he let himself really think about it, he decided it was all so futile, as futile as existence itself. Now and then he made an effort to distract himself, but his mind wouldn't oblige.

His eyes opened at some point. A few minutes, or perhaps a few years later. She was here again. In that same green dress and bare feet, looking through him. The bluish light touched her on all the same places and sat around her like a faint halo. His eyes blinked: one, two…three. This body wasn't his, these thoughts not his own. He lay claim on not an atom in this universe and that soft realization set over him like an overwhelming fog of melancholia. He became aware of his own breathing, and then a second one. Was that thunder outside? Her line of sight led to an entirely unknown time and space.

"The charm in dying is that nothing is lost."

A lone cockroach near the nightlight caught his eye, and when he refocused after a few seconds, she was gone. The familiar sense of utter loneliness settled upon him. Eyes red and feet cold, he faded out.