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A man stands beside a thundering waterfall, perched upon a platform barely wide enough to host him.
He raises his hands, blindly grasping at the coarse outcrop in front of him, searching for weathered ledges able to hold his weight. Narrowing his eyes, he feels around a potential shelf and – when he finds no cracks or fractures – he hauls himself upwards. The rock scratches against a nail and he winces as it bends against his fingertip and snaps.
His other hand finds a hold and his foot follows suit, dragging against the rocky wall until it finds somewhere to balance. Pushing off with his aching legs, his hands desperately hunt for higher ledges, nails long forgotten as he uselessly hangs from the outcrop. He drags his body up and up until his hand scrabbles at the grassy slope above, fingers digging into sandy soil that crumbles under his grasp but provides just enough purchase for his limbs to follow.
Swinging a second leg onto the rock, he pulls himself away from the edge and goes to shift into a sitting position, leaning back on his hands. Or he would’ve, if they didn’t slip out from under him.
He falls backwards and his hands make a pathetic attempt at preventing the movement, sliding around on the slippery section of rock as his head makes contact with a pool of water. A pained cry escapes his lips as a segment of granite – eroded by years of rushing water and harsh winds into a sharp spike – strikes his head, softened only slightly by the thick braid tied into his hair.
Groaning, he pulls himself upwards, leaning forward and folding in on himself with sediments digging into his knees.
He presses a hand against the fresh wound. A warm, thick liquid slowly squeezes between the gaps of his fingers, and he can feel his skull throbbing, his heart pulsing and his mind growing foggy. The world starts to spin; his head grows heavy and his neck screams under the sudden weight placed upon it.
His hands shake and his body trembles.
It was horribly overwhelming.
It all was, really.
A brewing headache circles his skull like a starved bird of prey, sending spasms of pain that stop any thought in its tracks. Hot tears stream down his cheeks, a jarring contrast to the freezing air that forces goosebumps across his exposed skin. His chest feels tight, mouth gasping for air in between sobs; his panting loud and obnoxious as it rattles in his ears.
His knees sting with scratches and he can feel the sediments embedded in stinging scrapes on his elbows. Dirt has built an uncomfortable barrier between his nail and its bed, and he desperately suppresses the urge to simply rip his nails out. Now-wet clothes cling to his body in all the wrong places and – as it’s brought to his attention – he raises his hand to claw uselessly at his shirt, painting it a lovely maroon from blood and soil before catching on to the lack of reward from his futile efforts.
He holds his hands out and blinks at them through blurry eyes. They are disgustingly dirty.
Experimentally, he rubs a dusty fingertip against another and is promptly consumed by a combination of urges to shriek or vomit or find the sharpest rock to cut all his fingers off at the same time. Instead, only a shiver runs down his spine. The dirt and dust – in all it’s infinitesimal size – sparks an intense feeling of discomfort that sits like a boulder in his chest.
The particles rub against his cheek as he slaps a hand over his mouth, suppressing whatever noises of anguish that had begun clawing at his throat. It does good to intimidate the rising bile into slowing its pace.
The hand moves higher, knuckles digging into his eyes with enough pressure to force out more tears, as if the action would easily remove his precious sight. He wishes it could. He’d be left with one less sense to deal with, after all.
His other hand spreads sticky blood across his jaw as grimy fingernails claw at the rest of his face, tearing at thick, healed skin and revitalising familiar phantom pains. His hair is soaked through, dripping splotches of water onto his arms as the strands dangling over his forehead add to the streams cascading from his eyes. He can feel that his braid is similarity wet – though, he can assume it’s contrastingly covered in blood – and its weight pulls on his scalp.
He squeezes his eyes shut.
The waterfall is as loud as thunder beside him, the sound of water crashing onto rock echoing throughout the valley. Wind howls past his ears, whipping hair against his sore, puffy eyes and seamlessly matching the cacophony already abusing the peace and quiet. The gale makes the nearby eucalyptus trees groan, their leaves striking one another in an awful, grating rustling.
A tawny frogmouth booms and hisses in the distance, and a motorbike frog calls out from a nearby puddle, prompting a chorus of buzzes and clicks and hums and whines from the various other creatures hiding in the darkness.
An aeroplane takes off from the airport, the rumbling of its engines carrying across the plains and suburbs and valleys and reaching him with a roar that shakes his exhausted body. The strong breeze carries the distant sound of a siren, piercing his ears with its unnaturally high pitch. Someone slams their hand against a car horn as they travel one of the roads close by and he can hear the sound of tires spinning out, soon followed by a loud crash and snapping branches.
He doesn’t even have the energy to hope everyone is okay.
All he can do is hurt. Because everything hurts.
It’s too loud and too quiet, too bright and too dark, too much but somehow not enough to keep himself together; it’s like he’s floating in a painful in-between, like the world is trying to force him to stay put, frozen in one place.
Or like it’s trying to push him into giving up.
The idea wasn’t foreign to him, of course, considering it was the reason he was here in the first place. But he planned to at least sit with his thoughts for a bit, not just continue his pattern of suffering into his last moments.
So – as any person sitting on the edge of a cliff and one wrong move away from their death would –, he closes his eyes and shuts out the world around him. Everything melts into peaceful background noise and the light burning through his eyelids fades out. The throbbing pain of his wound dulls, and his body relaxes, shoulders slumping forward.
The world slows and slows and slows until... it stops – as much as a constantly spinning planet can stop.
He can feel himself be gently lifted by cupped hands and placed into a void of darkness, of silence; cold, invisible fingers run down his arm and the movement should’ve felt ticklish, had he been able to feel anything at all.
The hands grab onto his, carefully tracing the creases of his palms, then his fingers, before pulling them from his body, ripping muscles apart without pain. They separate his skin and his bones, peeling molecule from molecule and skeleton from man. Each segment is delicately disassembled and consumed by the nothing, by the null he’s become achingly, lovingly familiar with over the course of his life.
His mother used to call it his way of restarting, of resetting – like some kind of machine. As if feeling overwhelmed was simply some kind of malfunction; as if it was a problem, a problem soon placed upon his ever-growing pile of problems currently – finally – teetering on the edge of death.
To anyone else, the man has curled into a tight ball on the ledge; face buried in his knees and arms hugging them close. His green eyes are screwed shut and his lashes flutter softly in the wind. His whole body is shaking, whether from the cold, or the pain, or his out-of-body experience; he doesn’t know – nor does he know anything, his brain fading away into the void of space.
The hands continue to dismantle his body, putting away all his bits and pieces into the nooks and crannies of nothingness for – presumably – safekeeping.
Soon, he’s nothing and the world is nothing, and there’s almost nothing at all with the exception of a quiet beating, the pumping of a disconnected heart floating in the endless expanse of space.
It thumps.
It thumps again.
He can hear that it’s pounding faster than it should be, as if it was panicked, nervous. As if it was in pain.
Sympathy courses through his stolen veins and he silently calls out to it, offering empty words of comfort; nothing will hurt you here, nothing but yourself. It’s okay.
It will be okay.
It seems to help. The heartbeat slows, its owner calming down, relaxing into its current situation drifting in the void, far away from wherever it came from. He thinks that if a heart could show emotions – or if it could use any sort of language, bodily or not – it would smile at him.
Suddenly, there’s a quiet, unmoving shift in the black and his everything begins to lazily pull back towards him; invisible atoms orbiting his thoughts like a planet. They slot into the jigsaw puzzle of a human body, realigning and connecting with the beating heart. Blood pumps through his veins, muscles flex beneath tanned skin dotted with freckles and scars and he becomes him again, just calmer this time.
Taking a deep breath out, he settles back into the feeling of a body and all it’s weird attachments, feelings and aches. When he inhales, the cool air is harsh against his throat but rather comforting, nonetheless. His heart, though still loud in his ears, has quieted down to a level he can push to the back of his mind.
One by one, he bends the tip of each finger, then the whole finger, smiling at the familiar stretch of tendons.
After a moment of breathing, existing, he properly – for the first time since he’s reached his perch on the rock – opens his eyes, his breath catching on an exhale.
The view was nothing short of gorgeous.
The moon radiated a soft glow, creating silhouettes of the tall trees swaying in the breeze, their soft rustling stretching down the hills and into the suburbs. Manufactured lines of pale-yellow lights outline the highways and main roads, sharp beams occasionally cutting through the thin forest as cars travel lonely paths back to isolated homes.
In the dim moonlight, he can see the waterfall travelling down the slope along its carefully weathered path. The rushing water is surrounded by small boulders, a sprinkling of grasses and a few trees growing precariously on the sides of eroded outcrops. A lookout platform stands out against the natural landscape, marking the end of the main hiking trail he hadn’t even tried to follow.
In the distance, the city sits as a black smudge against the night sky, the logos of mining companies shining reds and blues and yellows that are all mixing together. A flashing red light blinks in a gap between the clouds, the plane from earlier now turning in a wide circle to fly north, it’s rumbling no longer reaching his ears.
He drags his eyes to the ledge before him, dropping his knees and resting his hands on the rock, tracing his fingers over the soft blades of grass, droplets of water collecting on his skin. Looking back over his shoulder, the puddle mirrors the rough outline of his face as it stares back at him, the breeze creating ripples that disturb the moon just above his head. He pokes the water and smiles softly as his features melt away.
Turning around and scooting forward, he approaches the edge and dangles his legs off it, swinging them back and forth. He stares out at the horizon, raising a hand and loosely tracing the topography with his finger. Flat, undulating plains stretch out towards the coast where he can imagine the ocean lapping greedily at the shore, taking and giving seaweeds and rocks and sediments.
“It’s weird, isn’t it,” he whispers aloud to no one and nothing in particular, his voice hoarse and words scratchy against his throat. He vaguely gestures at the landscape and lets out a light chuckle. “How the world would spin even without us.”
It creates and destroys, weaponizing the sense of purpose we built for ourselves to place ourselves leagues above the very ground we stand on. Morals, beliefs, values, ideas, religions; we made it all up, invented ideas followed as if the very universe enforces them.
The horizon, the city, the houses and roads, the trees, the birds sleeping peacefully in their woven nests. None of it is truly anything at all, their names just sounds turned into something with made-up meaning. Nothing is more than an agglomeration of small, microscopic molecules if you think too hard about it.
Thinking is a dangerous game when you think about why you’re here, why anyone is here, what those people say, what they think about you; their eyes acting like sharp daggers, exposing each of your insecurities, your flaws, your malfunctions.
He was always told he thought too much.
Just after graduating, he’d started questioning how humans came to be, how – as a species – we suddenly started thinking and speaking and creating. Neither his parents, nor his friends, found any interest in answering his depression-fuelled questions and instead opted to show him the beauty of a library and the internet.
On his first visit, he was almost immediately enamoured by the rows upon rows of books filled with centuries of knowledge; all accessible to him with the swipe of a card. He skipped over the fantasies and the fictions, making a beeline for the history section.
It was there that he chose his first three novels; a dictionary-cross-textbook to learn all the words he didn’t know, a book dedicated to simplifying the universe’s past and one discussing human history.
The last book, according to his mother, was what – in her words – changed him.
His parents weren’t particularly religious, but they weren’t awfully progressive either. It wasn’t until he hit the later chapters of the book that he’d first heard of being ‘queer.’ Suddenly, with the flip of a page, his high-school years made sense; the explicit lack of girlfriends and crushes, his preference for hanging out with his guy friends, hatred for the topic of weddings and brides.
It was the missing piece of his puzzle; an answer for why he never truly fit in.
And from that point onwards, the questions never stopped. Books answered his questions but simultaneously made him ask more.
The hours of his day – once spent downing drinks at parties and politely declining lust-filled offers – were now spent flipping through books about human history, evolution, gender, dinosaurs, geology; anything he could find that seemed somewhat interesting without exceeding his borrowing limit.
For the first time in his life, he felt content, he felt happy.
His empty gaze shifts to his hands, dirty and covered in blood. Raising a pointer finger, he squints at it, tracing his eyes over his fingerprint and all its unique ridges and loops and swirls. He raises his other hand and points his fingers towards one another, watching intently as he slowly moves them closer and closer.
When his fingertips press against one another, a soft warmth flows through his body, coursing through his veins and poking at his cold heart. Interlacing his fingers, he can almost imagine the feeling of another person’s hand in his; maybe someone who could be an anchor for his spiralling mind, for his growing self-inflicted insanity, or someone who’d just sit there and hold him close.
His books often discussed theories. He hated theories; he wanted answers, not guesses.
How did other species come to be?
How did – on this isolated chunk of material floating in space – thousands of animals and creatures and insects evolve from seemingly nothing. Oh- sorry, we haven’t actually figured that one out! We just have a really good, scientifically consistent guess.
There was never one true answer to these kinds of questions.
Some theories discount evolution in their entirety, some believe life started with microscopic organisms thriving off the thermal energy radiated by deep sea vents, others say life arrived on meteors, or that life never arrived at all; is it all just a simulation?
For life on land, the theories are a little more straightforward. The planet’s early atmosphere didn’t just start filled with oxygen, no, it was mostly nitrogen and methane and carbon dioxide, and all the other gases our kind can’t breathe in.
Many believe the first ‘living things’ on land – well, in shallow marines on the coast – were cyanobacteria. Tiny, microscopic organisms that kickstarted the photosynthesis process, swapping carbon for oxygen and, over hundreds of millions of years, building the atmosphere we see today. They provided the air necessary for everything else to follow.
He breathes out, his exhales a misty cloud, the miniscule droplets briefly highlighted by the moonlight before rapidly dissipating into the cold night air. His breathing is rough and shaky, each inhale sending tremors through his lungs as they catch up from his earlier climb.
What created the ground beneath our feet?
Rocks made from billions of interlocking crystals welded together by incomprehensible pressures deep within the molten rock of internal Earth. The rocks – and everything else – sit on the surface of plates, moving with them as they’re pushed this way and that by currents of magma. Where the plates meet is where he fears most; where material crashes into another and folds and bends, where earthquakes shake and landslides fall and volcanoes erupt without much more than a rumble.
Maybe that’s why he came to this country, located so far from the boundaries of any plates and far from where seismic quakes would be considering anything close to frequent.
He reaches out and lightly brushes the outcrop beneath his body, recognising the coarse grains of a granite, rather common in this area. A small piece breaks off beneath his touch and he rolls it around in his palm, the harsh, weathered edges pressing into the soft skin. Raising his arm, he throws the rock, smiling as the sound of its impact echoes through the valley.
How did Earth form?
Asking how the planet, and all the things that came with, was created is the kind of question scientists have been trying to answer for centuries. In short, we don’t really know.
But yet again – like the majority of scientific phenomena – there are theories.
His favourite was the Big Bang.
The solar system starting as a cloud of dust and gas, then seeded with heavy elements from the explosion of a nearby star. The formation, the solar nebula, collapses and spins into a disc, the material growing hotter and hotter until a young star forms in the centre. It ignites, and forms our Sun, creating powerful waves that blow the remaining matter out into the depths of space. Clumping together, this matter forms asteroids, and with enough, it becomes protoplanets and planets themselves. These bodies migrate towards and away from the Sun without an established reason.
We just know they ended up where we see them now.
He drags his gaze across the landscape, watching as clouds lazily drift across the dark horizon and lights flicker on and off in the sleeping city. Settling his eyes on the night sky, he admires the few twinkling orbs scattered in the black. They seem to double in number as he focuses and his eyes adjust.
Despite the light pollution in the aptly named City of Light, the darkness sparkles with a splattering of stars, almost like an artist has flicked white paint from their paintbrush onto a black canvas.
I’ve always liked stars, he thinks, a soft smile pulling on his lips.
Stars are – in the simplest form – like us; they are born, they live, and they die, though we don’t have the same tendency to fade out or explode.
His friend, his best friend, liked stars. He was an astronomer after all.
One time, he brought up the topic to him, asking about the death of stars.
“The stars we see… are they already dead?” he’d hummed, leaning into the side of the bed and stretching his legs.
It was a saying he’d heard a million times before. The kind of thing you say to your mates to make them feel a little uneasy, like that you can always see your nose, or that your toes are always touching. That the stars you see aren’t alive anymore.
His friend had simply shrugged.
“Stars live for a long, long time,” he’d answered, turning around in his chair and allowing grey-blue eyes to meet green. “It’s not impossible that a star we see now has already expired, but it’s unlikely that one will die right as it’s light is on its way to Earth. I’d say most we see are alive. But I guess we’ll never really know.”
He didn’t get it at the time – nor does he truly understand it now – but he’d accepted the response nonetheless.
Much like all of his questions, it was left unanswered in some shape or form.
Hours and hours poured into reading dog-eared books and encyclopedias, scrolling outdated websites and searching scientific blogs, borrowing university textbooks from friends of friends. And yet, he would never find something definitive.
The only true answer he found was to just say that it did. That It happened.
That everything occurred at the right time, in the right place, that each piece of the puzzle slipped into its spot when and where it needed to over millions upon millions of years. And when a piece was missing, progress simply slowed but never stopped. The world always kept spinning.
When cyanobacteria began photosynthesising, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, they didn’t know it was going to kill them; that they’d have to evolve and try again and again for centuries. That they’d have to wait for it all – for the universe – to perfectly align.
When dinosaurs paused to watch the rolling dust plumes as they blocked out the Sun, and as the air got colder and colder around them, they didn’t know they were going to die. That only a few creatures would survive and become the backbone for over two million species.
When people turn a blind eye to the gradual collapse of their carefully constructed planet, do they ever stop to think about how they’ve played a role like he does? That they, at some point, have contributed to this mess.
And maybe he had come to regret learning about the things he did, to regret finding interest in the birds calling from his window, in the ground beneath his feet, in the air within his lungs. It steadily became a sort of burden; to try and understanding everything, to form his own idea of the hows and the whys.
The answer he found at the end of every book was easy, it was simple, and it made sense; that it just did.
But for whatever reason, his brain could never accept it.
He kept asking questions, almost begging for the universe to answer with something holding an air of finality. The rabbit hole became a warren, then multiple spread from that; complex and confusing and sitting idly in the depths of his mind. After all, without an answer, how could he share what he knows with anyone else? How could he answer their questions if he can’t even truly answer his own?
Within the whirlpool of thoughts spinning in his head, one question stood out to him as it lazily bobbed amongst the waves.
If everything just happens – and has happened – because it simply does, with no particular reason to blame, then what was the point of him?
Because his existence – much like yours and much like mine – has no real purpose, no matter how hard we try to give it one. And when someone finds that everything before them was just a game of chance, sometimes it’s hard to stop yourself from wanting a reason, something to motivate you. To keep you going.
He stares down at the waterfall as it rushes down into the valley, the moonlight flickering as it catches on flying droplets. At it’s base, the creek curves and disappears beneath the tree canopy, solid boulders and sharp spikes lining the water.
It’s hard to feel motivated to exist when your very life is infinitesimal; just a grain of sand in the ocean of history the planet holds, not to mention the universe.
He opens his mouth, the smell of rain familiar and light on his tongue. The cool sea breeze blows his hair from his face and pushes a group of dark clouds across the sky, leaving an opening of darkness that appeared almost like a gash amongst the incoming storm. He lazily examines the new array of sparkling lights.
One star catches his eye, leisurely shining and twinkling in the night. He notes that it sits observably further from any others.
Now, he wouldn’t consider himself emotional per say, but when his mind describes the star as lonely, something bubbles up from deep in his chest; something guilty and sympathetic and broken.
He raises his hand and points at it, squinting and lining up the tip of his finger with the star.
It intermittently glows brighter and, for a second, he can almost imagine his rapid heartbeat synchronising with the star’s pulsing. It matches him, and he matches it.
He watches its weak glow and frowns at its solitude in the dark, endless void of space. He pictures what it might look like all those light years away, and wonders if it can see him. Pinching his fingers together, he imagines himself hugging it, giving it some comfort.
He’s not sure why he feels pity for a star – since it has quite literally done nothing to command his sympathy –, especially not something so miniscule to his eyes.
Perhaps he feels bad because the star reminds him of himself; the loneliness, the solitude, the kilometres of land he’s put between himself and the people he loves. Though in his case, the distance was self-inflicted.
It was stupid, really, to book a one-way flight as he did, having weaved a set of convincing lies and formed a rough plan to drive back to his best friend on the other side of the country. He hated driving, his friend knew that, and yet he still let him go.
“Check in with me twice a day,” he’d asked, pushing his glasses up his nose and laying down a list of demanding rules he hadn’t felt inclined to follow – though most were just for his safety. “I can send you money if you’re in a pinch, and make sure to keep your internet system up to date, okay? And you need to bring this and this…” he zoned him out at that point, watching with tired eyes as his friend scribbled down a list of items in messy handwriting onto the back of a receipt.
He drops his outstretched arm and presses his jacket pocket between his hand and his side. Paper crinkles.
A tear rolls down his cheek.
He tried not to dwell on the fact he wouldn’t see him again, hug him again, that he wouldn’t hear his complaints about work. That he wouldn’t hear his voice at all. It would hurt, he knew that when the first lie left his mouth. But the whole point – the point of all of this – was that he wouldn’t have to deal with it, the mess he leaves behind would be everyone else’s problem.
He didn’t have a choice… no purpose, no reason to exist, nothing motivating him to continue. There was no point in trying to live. He didn’t want to live… right?
Right?
His eyes sting and he can feel his throat constricting. He swallows, trying to force the crawling ball of emotion back down.
A sob cuts through the settled silence like knife to skin.
He loves his friend more than anything. He moved countries, no, continents with him when he got his new job, changing his sleep schedule to cope with the hours of someone studying the night sky. And his friend has done nothing but support him back, endlessly helping him with finding work and his health. Taking him for his birthday to find a new despite not once in his life ever wanting a pet.
His world would be nothing without him in it.
Pictures of his usually inexpressive best friend breaking down in their apartment flash through his mind; his cat lying alone on his bed, waiting patiently for him to return and her silly confused face as his friend sobs into her fur. He thinks of him in a smart black suit with flowers sitting pretty in his pocket, his lab coat replaced for the day. The flowers would probably be lilacs, that’s what he last told him after all. His best friend always knew his favourite despite it changing more than twice a year, it was almost tradition for him to ask at the start of each month.
He likes sunflowers now.
He thinks about his parents across the ocean. He thinks about how they probably wouldn’t find out for a while. Would they cry when they get the call? Would they dress in respectful black too? Would they even bother to fly over, or would they just hold their own event at home?
Memories of his other friends pull more tears from his eyes, a sudden pang of guilt making his heart ache. He remembers his orange-haired friend lying on his bed rambling about snakes and Greek mythology, keeping him awake and distracted, their presence grounding and oh so kind; and the short man with the wide, unfaltering smile and the way he would yell when the others teasingly bent their knees to talk to him.
He thinks about the solemn masked barista and their quiet friendship, coffee trips turning to long afternoons at small tables, a stranger becoming a shoulder to cry on.
A pathetic attempt at a laugh falls from his lips, remembering how easy it was for his best friend to break the man’s scary exterior, the way the pair’s eyes lit up with excitement when one of them mentioned an old video game.
He thinks of all his friends overseas and the list of people in his contacts he hasn’t seen in years. People he won’t see.
Pulling his knees to his chest, he glares down at his hands and squeezes sharp indents into his bloody palms.
“I- I can’t,” he whispers, shaking his head.
Life is, as expected, a rollercoaster of ups and downs and in his humble opinion, he has already experienced more than his fair share of downs. Moving to a different country meant he lost friends and forced him to leave memories behind, not to mention the severe decline in his health due to stress; he still hadn’t managed to pick up a stable job after all and felt rather awful for relying so heavily on his friend.
With time, he’d begun to feel more and more self-conscious about himself; his body, his mind and most notably the scars on his skin. No amount of time spent at the gym seemed to help, only hurting his bank account and making the aching pains in his legs worse. Confined to using a cane and braces – or a wheelchair on his very worst days –, simply going to the shops became something he had to tell someone about.
When you start losing control over your physical form – the body you were born with and spent most of your life learning to manage –, your mind naturally panics and impossibly begs for the reins again.
His body is failing him; it’s failing to do the one task it was put here to do. And he just has to deal with it.
He returns his gaze to the star.
It blinks, and he wipes his stuffy nose on his sleeve.
“Do… do you have a choice?” he whispers, rubbing at his blurry eyes. “To keep going?”
It blinks
Death is, by every definition in the book, inevitable. Death will happen to everything and everyone at some point, but he supposes the difference between a star and himself is that he, at least, has control.
“You don’t, do you?” he rasps as it blinks again. “You have to live until you die… you- you can’t even do what I’m doing. I get a way out, I- I can just die when I want to. You just have to wait…”
Sometimes I feel like I’m waiting, he adds to himself, though he supposes that, logically, if the star could hear him, it could probably read his thoughts too.
Now, what he was waiting for? He’s not entirely sure.
Maybe an unexpected death, lightning deciding it was its time to shine or falling over with an invisible disease that’s been tearing him apart cell by cell without his knowing. Or maybe he slips when he moves to stand up, his defenceless form tumbling down into the rocky void before him. Perhaps, he does what he came here to do.
He considers these kinds of thoughts as a sort of… past time of his. It was fun after all; brainstorming lists upon lists of ways in which his world could turn black. He would, on occasion, take it one step further and imagine an alternate world; an alternative reality that, like his current one, would always end one way or another.
Sometimes these ways would be simple: falling from a height too great, a cold simply never getting better, taking the wrong turn with magic wings.
Sometimes, they hurt more than he thinks an imagination should.
Dying with the shaky thumbs of another pressing into his throat. His vision blurring with streaks of white, the last thing he felt was the sand in his eyes, sharp talons piercing the back of his neck, and the sensation of blood pooling beneath his head.
Dying to an arrow in the back; harsh, sharp, instant. Through the ringing of his ears, he could hear the cheers of his killer.
Dying without warning as he travels through forest on horseback. All he feels is an aching pang in his heart. All he sees is a red string flickering in his fading vision before snapping. All he hears is a deafening shriek, though the sound is not played to his own ears.
Dying with a clock ticking in the back of his mind, familiar taloned hands forcing a sword through his stomach, his gasp of pain blocked by the rising blood in his throat. He fades as he chokes and coughs, red running down his chin and splattering onto his slayer’s leather jacket.
Dying in the blink of an eye as he searches for his friends, the blood dripping from his mouth mixing with a slimy mucus. The creak of bamboo as it bends in the wind is the last thing to reach his ears.
Dying without death.
Since thinking of it, he believes this one would be the worst of all.
He was alone from the start but at least there were people there to keep him company, keep him sane. It wasn’t until he stabbed a sword through her chest that the world fell silent. Wind blowing against his hair, longer than he would prefer, decorated with lilacs and poppies. Behind him, sunflowers danced in the breeze, but, as he turned, he could only see their stems; their pretty yellow faces turned away from him. His fingers had grown slack, his sword hitting the soil with a dull thump.
Dying, whether it be in this world or a fantasy of his mind’s own creation, appears to be the one thing he can slightly control.
The star flashes particularly bright, pulling him from his thoughts.
“Your… existence, it sounds awfully lonely,” he frowns, speaking quietly under his breath. “It’s not like I’m much better.”
He pauses and tilts his head at it curiously.
“Do you want to be friends?”
It blinks once, then again, right after the other.
“We can be friends!” he says, a smile spreading across his face. “I- I can keep you company, until you die and stuff.”
It blinks.
“Y-yeah!” he exclaims, drying the last tear streak from his cheeks. “I have a choice. It’s not fair if I throw it away when peo- when things like you don’t get one.”
This wasn’t his purpose, no, but perhaps, it could be something that motivated him; by taking the opportunities others can’t. He, for all it was worth whilst ignoring himself, would do anything to make someone else feel happy.
And this star, though not a person, couldn’t choose when it died, nor could it live and experience like he could. So maybe, this star could live vicariously through him; an exchange of companionship for the chance to live.
It blinks.
“You’re so right,” he lets out a deep sigh, wiping his hands on the dew-covered grass. “I can’t just up and leave, I know. I don’t give up, I never have! And I never will!”
He leans over the edge of the outcrop, peering down at the waterfall and the slick ledges he’d climbed up.
“I didn’t choose an easy spot to get down from, did I?” he grumbles, moving to dangle his legs.
He glances at the star, and – shockingly – it blinks.
“Yeah, yeah,” he chuckles. “I wasn’t planning on getting back,” he mocks the star’s voice – or at least what he thinks it’d sound like. A stinging sensation pulses through his body at the movement.
A hand unconsciously shoots to the back of his head, lightly pressing against the forgotten wound. He winces at the sharp pain and the throbbing headache revived by the attention.
“Stupid rock,” he mumbles. I’d love to throw it into this stupid valley.
Turning back around, he shifts forward and presses his stomach to the ground with a newfound mission. He stretches his hands into the pool of water behind him and feels around for the rock. I should probably see how sharp it is anyways… then I can see if it did anything too damaging.
After a moment of awkward searching, he finds the spike and presses his finger against it. The top was rather dull, his head probably snapping off any sort of weathered point. He stares into the dark water, hoping for the moonlight to brighten the pool so he can examine it properly.
Instead, the rippling water reflects a pale orange hue.
He raises his head to the horizon and his eyes squint against the light.
“The sun is coming up?!” he groans, raising his wrist to glance at his watch… which wasn’t there. “Ah, right,” he’d left it in the car with the rest of his belongings.
The rest of his life. The life that he’d been convinced to keep by a star.
“By a star,” he echoes, glancing up at his new friend in question. “I’m- I sound crazy, talking to a freakin’ star,” he laughs, running a hand through his damp hair.
He turns back towards the city and pushes himself up, legs wobbling with the effort. The rising sun was barely visible to the west, and the skyscrapers were still doused in darkness. The streetlights would stay on for at least another hour.
The star still blinks at him.
“Hm?” he prompts, before instantly speaking again. “What am I going to do? That’s a good question…”
He rubs his chin thoughtfully, staring up at the star and balancing on one leg in an attempt to stretch the other out.
“Well… I told my friend, my other friend, that I’d be driving back to him on the other side of the country. I have a car for it!” he explains, gesturing down the valley. “I guess I could still do that… I’d be able to see you better without the light pollution, right?”
The star blinks.
“That’d be nice!” he smiles, trying to recall whether he might need anything else for the trip. “I should have enough money… might need some groceries though. And I should probably get some proper bedding.” For the last few days, he’d been sleeping in the boot of his car on a couple of blankets, and it’d certainly given him some neck pain.
He kneels down and moves himself to the edge of the outcrop once more. His lowers his legs and feels around for some sort of hold whilst his arms bear the majority of his weight, folded carefully on the ledge; the rock scraping against his scuffed knees and pushing into his sore palms. His foot finds a small crack to wedge itself into and he begins to shuffle his way down.
As expected, his climb down was a little more difficult than the climb up, slippery rocks making him panic and stumble whenever he reached a flat platform. On each one, he pauses and glances out at the landscape; the sunrise creeping through the sky, it’s light illuminating the tallest trees and birdsong filling the gaps of silence left by the waterfall.
He searches for the star, squinting into the fading darkness. It was no longer blinking but rather sitting as a solitary white speck against the cloudy sky that was slowly being coloured by oranges and yellows and pinks.
He watches as it was consumed by the sunlight, its own brightness not strong enough to put up any fight.
Raising his hand, he offers a small wave.
“I’ll see you tomorrow…,” he whispers, pressing his back against rock, his shirt soaking up morning dew. “…my friend.”
And just like that, the star – his star – disappears into the dawn of a new day, the start of a new chapter, the reclamation of his life.