Aware Death

Inspired by Fahrenheit 415, a personal favorite. Very short.

            The sound that filled the air was sickening, the sound of tearing, ripping apart the very ideas one could thrive on. I could count between the sounds. One, two, rip. One, two, rip. One, two, riiiiiip. Every sound made my heart lurch in my chest, my stomach ache.

 

            I stared as the man clutched a page in his large hand, tugging it free from the book’s binding. Rip. He was grinning like a mad man, a fool; his dark eyes had a blissful glint to them. He was enjoying this. He stared right at me this time as he tugged. Riiiiiip.

 

            “Stop it,” I whispered, fisting my hands in the hem of my shirt. He didn’t answer, didn’t move, stood like a good little statue should. Rip. My breathing quickened, and I felt my knees quiver. “Stop it!” I pleaded louder, and he just laughed at me. Stared and laughed and laughed and laughed. The sound was almost as sick as his desecration of the book.

 

            “Stop it!” I screamed, reaching up and pressing my palms to my ears. I could still hear him. One, two, rip. One, two, rip. One, two, rip. It was always there. I ran at him, knocking the book from his hands and pounding my fists against his broad chest. He just watched me, amused, before he reached down and clutched my wrists so tightly my fists unclenched and my fingertips began to numb.

 

            “You know the law,” he said, before tossing me to the side. I fell, my body thudding to the ground painfully. I pushed my upper body up and stared as he picked the book up again, as he began his sick ritual. One, two, rip. One, two, rip. My breath sobbed in and out of my chest, a sick, desperate sound.

 

            “But what harm can thought do?” I whispered, hanging my head, my shaggy hair covering my face, ruined from so long without attention. “What is life without thought, without meaning?”

 

            “Happiness,” the man said in a gruff, deep voice. My head snapped up and I stared at him, watched as paper floated slowly to the ground around him. “Without thought, there is happiness.”

 

            “No there isn’t!” I screamed, my voice growing shrill. “There is no happiness, no bliss! There is only a lie you choke down every night, that you regurgitate in the morning. That’s it. Do people seem happy to you? How many people do you know that have lost the will to live? How many people do you know who’ve given up on the very “life” we’re expected to enjoy? Too many!”

 

            I stared at him wildly, and he stared back. His hands had stopped moving, a page pressed between two large, calloused fingers. We stared in silence, before I spoke slowly, clearly, a strained control obvious in my words.

 

            “This life is nothing but an aware death,” I said. I forced myself to stand slowly on my shaking legs, to walk towards him. “If we can’t think, if we can’t express, then we turn to nothing but a quite shell. A withered body with no mind. We become drones, and then nothing matters to us at all. And if nothing matters, if you have no thoughts, if your brain isn’t active, then aren’t you dead? The only difference here is that we’re aware of ourselves.”

 

            He stared at me, dark eyes now black, dismal. I walked up to him and stared down at the book in his hands. It’d taken me a life time to get a copy of a simple Dictionary; something I knew once had been an easy access book. And now he stood there, with the first half gone.

 

            “Just think about that the next time you’re enjoying your life,” I whispered as I walked past him, stopping so our shoulders were aligned. “Just remember that your life, your entire existence, is a lie. You’re dead, and better off so.”

 

            With an ach in my heart, my brain, my core, I walked again, away from him. I left the book half destroyed in his hands. I’d spend the next who knows how many years looking for another. But I’d find one, somehow. He could have this. Maybe it would open his eyes a little.

 

            As I walked off into the cold, damp dark, leaving him standing there, I didn’t need to see his face to know what I’d find. Lips turned down in a frown, confused, eyes dark and solemn and no longer happy. He’d be trembling; his large frame suddenly so small. And he’d be clutching that book to him, wondering if maybe, somewhere inside it, he could prove my words, his fears, wrong.

Author's Note

This may seem very random, it was written on a whim :)