The Euphiliac

The beginning to a short story I might finish one day

A few years ago, a woman asked me if I believed in God.  I thought it was an unusual question because I didn’t know what she meant by ‘God’.  The strangest part was that she didn’t seem to know either. He was some sort of man...  But He wasn’t like a man, He was more abstract, like love or thought. She wasn’t sure what He looked like, or even if He had a look about Him.  She didn’t even know why it was a Him, or if He had a body, but she did know that He had a face, and that you couldn’t look upon it.

I thought it was a strange conversation at the time, but looking back it was really nothing.  I guess everything is nothing here. People trample over one another trying to get these things that they cannot acquire.  That’s all they want; that’s all anybody here wants.  A thing to possess and occupy them.  They are so numerous and innumerable, with slapstick names and like God or sex or wealth.  There are so many of these untenable and unimaginable things people will die for, but they don’t even know what it means to die for something, and that’s the real problem.  How can you find something to make life meaningful and mystifying, if no one knows that life can have meaning? They’ll kill time and kill resources trying to achieve something, but they usually just kill themselves along the way. Meanwhile, nobody is really sure if it ever meant anything, but everybody is always certain that it amounted to nothing.  Death is right there for everyone to take and make theirs like all of the other things they want, but they’re so utterly terrified by it.  They don’t even know why either. Rather, it’s because they don’t know why that they’re frightened.  They’ve never had any of the things they want, and they’re too afraid to find out what happens when they take the only one of these things they can have.  This fear permeates the air here; no one notices it, but everyone feels it.  I thought it was nothing more than an amusing idiosyncrasy -- until I started to feel it too.  Dread, that’s what I heard they call it, and I despise it. Like hornets boiling under my flesh. Every second here is corroded by the burden of everyone's gnawing edict to gape and lurch at their own end.  Wherever I went, I could feel the strain of these down trodden, panic filled pests, reeling at the forefront of the rest of their lives. It ate at everyone. It ate at me... Until I found my own thing to consume me, and now I’m one of the dread-filled dejected, content in my uneasy denial. It was really simple, in honesty, but I guess you wouldn’t understand unless I tell you how…

I don’t know what I was before, but I began in the desert, somewhere off some interminable road that, like us, had somehow lost itself deep into the swelter. I remember the place had a funny sounding name. That’s where they found us.  At least that’s what they tell me. Apparently there were dozens of us, just out there somewhere watching the day pass and languishing in the sand. No cars, or tracks even. Just an unusual covenant cooly basking to death in open sky.