September 1, 2025
Footsteps stumble in front of each other. When does it end? What does the end feel like?
Yes. Sure. Philosophers always have some vague idea and everything. They always have something to say. But in the end it is just one thing. All things that end, just end. Nil. The end is nigh. That's that. A halt, call it a stop. It just is that. The end.
But what does it FEEL like?
One foot in front of the other. They walk criss-cross, the same path. Wrath it'd be if they stumble upon each other. But laugh the people who witness from the sides.
But there are no bystanders.
Nor do I trip upon my other foot. No.
When do the footsteps halt? Mine feel nigh, they'd never. But they have to.
But… when running away from a place, it doesn't matter. You do not stop. But either way the end is nigh.
They repeat stepping in front of the other, making me cross a road where even the buses I stare and beg towards… just honk at me. They would not touch me. Even when mine life is meaningless, they deem me unworthy for the end.
So, I walk. On the side path.
How repetitive life is… the same routine. The same things. The same fake smiles. The same… holding on.
Now I choose to go with the same steps. One in front of the other. Again and again. Recurring, but feeling lifeless. Never was it ever full with life. But the bystander found something to laugh about still.
I walk safely on the side path. Nobody else here.
The bus, the car, the bike… all the honking passes through my ears, but, I didn't have to care. They could just go… I wasn't in their way. Maybe I should be.
What's the point of this same old?
Same old noise. Same old silence.
I see electric wires hanging and wish it was in my path… perhaps it could help me reach elsewhere. Where I wasn't part of this… intelligent species, who couldn't live with themselves. Who had so many thoughts, but so less still…
'Danger. High voltage.'
Perhaps… it wouldn't be that bad. Perhaps feeling something new would be better. Perhaps being taken to a hospital where I could die or perhaps be given all that attention… people trying to save me.
How good must that feel?
But I was ten feet away now… I didn't even look back. My eyes find the far away bus stop… perhaps there might be something new there. In this nauseating and huge world.
My eyes feel like looking up at the sky but my stomach twists even at the idea of the image of it… so vast and… empty. So common. So repetitive. With nothing else in sight.
At least there was that guy at the bus-stop there. With a cigarette pressed between his lips, eyeing towards me like a predator… but I shouldn't judge.
My feet feel like stopping cautiously in response to the staring, but they don't. They get me to the bench, past this alcoholic smelling of… well, alcohol. I collapse on the bench of the bus-stop and breathe… was I breathing until now? At least I was now. But the stench of the cigarette makes me not want to.
College. Socializing. All that repetitive chaos… is just so jarring. I deserve a break from all of it. Even when I just chickened out from some function or whatever. Fuck it. I couldn't bear the eyes. The continuous suffocation in the wide open spaces.
A bus passes. Then two. The guy continues to eye at me but I don't say a thing.
"The buses don't stop here," he says, scoffing to himself. I look at him stare at me and then the road before taking a puff out of his cigarette, while shaking his head – left and right, just slightly. "They go to the depot. Barely ever stop here. Barely."
I just barely make a kind of bow towards him, which seems to surprise him a bit. He just throws a smirk at me, and I turn to face towards the depot in the far distance… I really didn't want to walk. But my legs had their own mind; I start walking again. Mindlessly. Slowly. In the same pace as before… but with more of me screaming to just give up.
Life… is pointless. There is no thrill. It is repetitive.
But I suppose some higher being had heard me. Heard my call.
The empty street gets two pairs of footsteps now. But I didn't mind. Perhaps the guy got bored of his cigarette… or perhaps he wanted a new one, or more of whatever he was drinking…
I make way and go into the opening, the traffic signal where there were others. I join the lady trying to cross the road, and cross it alongside her. Three pairs of footsteps escape the traffic… it was as if the cars and bikes were mindless. A bus honks, making me move and fall behind the lady – but the footsteps behind me aches a fear and makes me not stop.
As we get in the clear, some underground place, where the bus had gone to… the basement of the bus depot… the darkness wraps around me like a cold blanket to the fever rising in my chest – perhaps it was fear, but it was warm to the surrounding cold.
The footsteps behind me pace up, so do mine, so do the girl's. I trip and fall to the girl's feet, while turning back to face the guy, with a sulk up my face – fear perhaps. But the guy just stares at me for a bit and I realise that there is no expression he could read on my face… my head had made up the sulk… and my beating heart… was in thrill, not fear.
I hold the girl's leg firmly as she tries to escape. I wanted to escape too, however thrilling this felt. I grip at her leg and get up, staring back at the guy who just kneels to the ground and barely looks up at me as I go where the bus had entered, with the girl's leg still in my grasp. The girl screams from under the guy and I just stare at her blood drip. But I don't let her leg go, I walk forward, looking back until I couldn't see them.
Her voice finally seems to fade as I now hear whispers of the crowd within the depot… and stares pierce through my skin as I shyly, looking down, walk a few steps before finally being overwhelmed to just stop and loosen my grip on the girl's leg.
I hold my bag's shoulder straps with both my hands and barely look at the leg I had dropped… now turned purple, dry of blood, and cold.
"I-" I try to say, but my heart jumps out of my body as I hear the honk of a bus at my neck. I could feel it… I was right in the turn… the driver couldn't have seen me, to be able to stop fast enough- even then he'd ram into me, helplessly.
Why does one assume a bus driver to be a guy? I have never seen a lady… then again, to blame this on a female's driving… huh, another repetitive thing. A chaos.
I turn. I knew that I'd be on the ground when I see it. I knew I wouldn't even have time for lowly screams… yet I was too slow to catch myself from stopping from turning, or pushing myself off the path. It all happens too fast.
I lay on the ground thinking… finally, it wasn't… repetitive. It was different. As a matter of fact… it was never seen, not by me… not by anyone. But I cough as I laugh, as people gasp.
I hear pained shrieks. Of pity. I only stare at the roof… which was yet another floor where buses go from. It was an interesting design of a bus depot. Enough to bear so many buses' weight… I wonder what kind of a weight would be too much for it that it crushes. Moreover… I wonder… what kind of a weight could do that to a bus?
I turn to look at the only thing intact, but yet with a crack on it… the side mirror of the bus, fallen to the ground… as the bus just had stopped and even rolled back a bit… with its front so crushed that it didn't matter what gender the driver was… it didn't matter how many sharpnels of glass were in them… but it mattered how anybody could recognise who it was, even their family members… for even when the driver would be registered, they'd doubt the driver to have loafed away, giving the job to someone else… that was the way of the repetitive world.
My eyes catch a reflection and my body jumps in response. Everyone screams, seeing what I had seen… the answer to my question of what could do that to a bus, smashing everything within. That thing. The thrill turns into something else now… maybe fear finally… but I'm not sure… it twists my gut.
I quickly find a group of people and squeeze between them.
People… they believe black cats are bad omens. Over and over again I've heard it… both about black cats and myself. They don't like the black cats getting in their way… would stop and sit for a while before continuing, or they believe death would show them no mercy.
Hearing that about myself… that I'm bad luck…
Perhaps… they were right…
People fall down. Not because I push them, no. And even if I did… and even if a bus ran over them… they wouldn't burst out like that… without blood, just… white flesh, dry of blood, torn apart… butchered by… some… creature. What the hell could do that, and so quick?
Another one hits the wall… humans are 70% water… and only 30% of him remains… crushed together like a… newspaper folded with twists, over and over by a child who is bored. His eyes pop out… they just bulge… but they stay stuck to the body… as if the creature would crunch it down later, as a single fry…
But do black cats stop? They have a life too… they can get run over too. They are not just danger to everyone else… everything else can be danger to them… but nobody cares. They have to fend for themselves… so do the black cats.
It is only fair that I run.
But the leg in front of a leg, finally trip onto each other. I fall. And I feel the whole world falling apart.
It does.
I get crushed by the weight of reality falling down on me. All I had known. All the chaos… wound in a loop of repetition… knotted around my body now. This must be the end. Schrodinger's cat outside the box… is as good as dead.
But, death… isn't as simple, I suppose.
My fingers twitch. The whole world on my back. My chest bearing the weight of the reality I knew.
I barely open my eyes to see. But the dust stings my eye… yet they do not dare close. I see devilish eyes as a hand reaches out to me and graces my neck. The claw barely moving, but, slicing down my skin as it does.
Maybe it is the pain… but it feels like forever until the claw has moved halfway across my neck. Each moment it lets me embrace and know my pain. As it only increases.
I don't close my eyes… I can't move.
How could I even fend to myself… even if I could move? What strength can I bear to… be set free?
Hunger. Thirst. Exhaustion. Hopelessness. Regret…
Regret that the repetitive days in my cage… it could have been lived better. I should have held onto it than try to run away from it.
I almost forget the demon, the monster, in front of me. I get used to its claw on my throat. But confused on how I have not bled enough already to be dead.
Humans speak of a light, at the end of the tunnel of life. A light that leads to… afterlife. Yet afterlife seems to be a promise of life. Another life, of peace and the absolute. How idiotic.
But I see it. The light.
My eyes don't shy away or burn… they look back into th light, as if to glimpse an image of what lies ahead. The after. Which may be absolute… but… sounds promisingly repetitive. Yet what I wouldn't give for that.
My eyes tether, trying to push out my soul onwards into the light. And before I know it my hands are clawing and holding onto everything around this chaos. This wreck.
"FALL BACK!" they scream.
I hear guns clicking. People with masks raising their shields at the monster they had help escape with me. I don't move an inch as a sniper's laser shoots this way. As I look towards that way… towards where the sniper should be, in his scope I see the reflection of what he is aiming at. Standing still, menacingly.
"Fie…" somebody screams.
Hmm… the sniper was a sharp shooter, the bullet grazes past my shoulder… no. My shoulder grazes past it, and I turn to look at the dusty mirror.
"You will not trap me," the monster in the mirror says to me. "I freed us," I say, holding the sniper. "And then you go ahead and get me hungry… so hungry. And I… Am so… done already. This repetitive chaos will not wrap around our necks as a collar anymore. No more."
I throw the sniper in front of his friends, comrades, for them to shoot him. And I hunt. I eat, I quench my thirst.
"Mother… Would be proud of us. She went through pain for us." I tell myself.
But I don't feed on their flesh. No. That'd be disgusting.
I feel on their pain. Oh those lowly screams. The hope. The-
As I look up to see whose face it is, the knife in their hand dogs into my eye. I search their body for their neck, but as grab it they move away and push me to the ground.
"I'm HUNGRY!" I scream. "And you have lost," the monster tells me. "No. Mother… Her pain. The chaos… I'll be held captive again?" "Worse. You have slept too long… But I have stayed awake." "I only now fell to the ground and-"
"And look at that," somebody announces through speakers, and everyone cheers.
With bloodshot eyes I look around… At so many… People… In… Weird clothes, many covering their faces.
"We lost. I was not strong enough for him," it tells me.
I look up to face an eclipse, a man blocking the sunrays from meeting my one good eye.
"Who… Is that?" I ask.
The man descends fast, while taking something out of my chest… Which wasn't even there a while ago.
"The strongest hero in the history of the world. The Nameless hero, has won TTT."
"TTT?" I ask. "A feast the heroes have… Where they celebrate the heroes who take out VERMIN like us." "But I'm… Just hungry." "We fought hard, but HE is stronger…"
And they leave me there. Bleeding.
"HELLO?" I scream without moving my mouth… Calling the one I was talking to… Or anyone. "Please…"
"Months ago," I hear a voice, but not the one from before. Not the announcer. Not myself. Something else. "You were out there. You killed… Hundreds. No, thousands."
I cough, trying to laugh or reply.
"No. No… I understand. I'm not mocking you," it says, and I find a figure eclipse the setting sunrays. "Blood… is just so glistening and bright. So warm. People like us need it, once in a while. I understand."
I try to look at his face… The blur due to my teary eyes, don't help.
"His name is Varon Rihler," he tells me, this guy obsessed with blood.
"And?" I ask.
He scoffs, knowingly.
"No, I know. But, I'm here to tell you that I will kill him. I WILL avenge your BLOOD."
I look at him… begging him with my eyes; to tell me more.
"Stay still child. Your body may be broken, but your powers…"
I scream without what breathe is left on my lungs. And he tells me that the lady who took my eye is dead, as if to ease my pain as red threads stitch my wounds up but take my soul, leaving my body but taking the monster I am.
"Mother awaits," the monster says, and I smile until it chokes me while telling me, "Your repetitive chaos ends now… Rest. And be nicer to mother when you see her in hell."