The classroom always smells the same. Dry-erase markers, the faint ozone of recycled air, and the hidden scent of human attention, or rather the lack of it. I sit by the window, the best position. It provides a focal point when the teacher's voice becomes a drone and the social cacophony of my classmates click and whirr too visibly.
A straight-A student isn't special; it's just natural fact. Efficient. Forgettable. I understand the equations on the board, the dates in the textbook, the unspoken rules. That's the problem. Understanding makes you an observer, and observers, by definition, stay outside the frame of life.
The bell rings, sharply. The room dissolves into predictable motion of hyperactive adolescents. I pack my things with care not in any rush. My parents texted: "Working late. Money on counter." Predictable.
Self-sufficiency is another quiet, well-constructed fact. Loneliness is a sentimental word for it, used by those who needlessly cling to things. I prefer silence. Silence is honest. It has weight. It lets you hear the unseen and see the unheard.
After school, the city transforms. My daily exploration begins. My camera, an older model I keep in perfect working order, is a truer companion than any person. It doesn't ask for anything but to see.
My destination today is the old Midtown Gazette building, a twelve-story tomb for dead news. The fence is bent. An eerie invitation. Inside, the world changes. The city's roar fades into a, swallowing silence, broken only by the rhythmic drip of water and the deep, gruff groans of settling iron. The air is cold, tasting of damp newsprint, rust, and time.
This is where I feel present. Not in the living, curated world, but here, in the beautiful, honest truth of decay. Photography isn't about capturing beauty. It's about noticing what persists after everyone has stopped looking. It's a conversation with a ruin.
Click. Whirr.
I frame the cavernous press hall. Giant machines stand like frozen fossils, silhouetted by fierce sunset light stabbing through broken windows. Click. I find a staircase, its metal treads groaning a protest that echoes up the building's hollow spine. Each floor is a new page in a photo essay only I will develop.
On the eighth floor, I find a room marked ARCHIVES. The door jamb is splintered. Inside, a treasure trove: collapsed shelves have spilled a river of yellowed photographs and brittle newsprint. I step in, my boots crunching on glass. The light is divine, a solid, golden slab cutting through the dust-choked air. I kneel, lifting a single print. A woman from the 1940s, laughing before a headline about victory. A moment of joy, buried here.
Click. Whirr.
I don't hear the first groan. I feel it. A subsonic tremor through the soles of my boots, traveling up my spine. The building lets out a long, tired sigh, the sound of a structure forgetting how to stand.
The world lurched.
A violent shudder threw me from my knees. The ceiling vomited plaster. The golden light was obliterated in a storm of choking dust. My mind, always a processor, raced: Structural failure. Compromised load-bearing wall. The demolition schedule was wrong-
A thunder-crack split the air. The floor became a slope. The archive shelves slid past in a slow, terrifying avalanche of history. I scrambled, not toward the door, a maw of falling debris, but back toward the window, the source of the now-dead light.
My hand closed around my camera. My anchor. My heart was steady, my mind preternaturally clear. This wasn't panic. It was devastating, final clarity.
So this is the last frame, I thought.
The noise was apocalyptic, a roaring, grinding symphony of collapse. The window before me spider-webbed, and beyond the cracks, the ordinary world tilted on its axis. I didn't think of my parents, or school, or the empty apartment. I thought of the silent, beautiful ruins I would never see. The stories in the walls I would never hear.
Then, the floor gave way. There was no fall, only a sudden, total envelopment in the deafening roar of concrete and time.
A final, defiant wish crystallized in the heart of the chaos, a will screaming into the coming dark not in fear, but in profound, desperate desire:
I don't want it to end. I want to see more. I want to understand it all. I don't want to forget. I don't want my memories of be or not.
"Confirmed. Extra skill 『Memory』 …successfully acquired."
"Confirmed. Cancel Pain…successfully acquired."
I feel a warm liquid trickle from my body. Debris piled above me as if I were a mound of rubble and flesh.
I this my fate? I this my destiny? Was I never ment to achieve anything of significance with this life I was borrowed?
I wish I weren't. To the god that decide my fate before my I even existed. I do not accept your commands, I will defy you with this last breath I take. My life will diverge from your intentions.
"Confirmed. Extra Skill 『Defiance』 successfully acquired. Evolving extra skill 『Defiance』 into unique skill 『Divergence』… Successful."
"Confirmed. Resist Natural Effects… Successfully acquired."
I desired for greatness all my life yet the is how I perish. My desire grows with every moment that passes, my greatest desire is to be a being, on beyond a weak physical body. A being that is, in essence, Sublime.
"Confirmed. Extra Skill 『Desire』 successfully acquired. Evolving extra skill『Desire』into unique skill 『Sublimation』… Successful."
"Confirmed. Constructing a spiritual body… Successful."
I hear a strange voice. I must be hallucinating from the grief.
...