Hello?

content:

Is this the real life? Or is this just fantasy?

The lonely human figure opens his eyes and stares out into the darkness.

Where is he? It’s pitch black, spotless and bare, depthless and deathless. He looks down at the ground, but sees naught but abyss. His feet hang loosely in the air. His body drifts in stasis. He looks up, but sees only the void stretching up, up, up, up. He alone floats at the end of all things… Or the start of all things.

Whatever this is, he can hear it. A lot of it. A cacophony of sounds and songs and sweet nothings, coming from all directions. They lash his ears from all sides, a melody malady. He can scarcely pick out a thread of noise from the clamour. Incessant chattering of animalistic things, left and right. Slugs of metal colliding into each other, echoing from behind. The defeaning clicks of some beast or confounded machine, rippling through his skin and bones. The noises weave through each other into a reverberating fabric.

But sometimes he catches threads in pure clarity.

The shriek of some vicious creature hammers his eardrums. The Lonely Human’s head spins around, breaths tight as he searches for the source. He sees nothing.

A harsh peal of laughter consumes the void as another voice screeches, “My precious! Mine!!” The lost person looks about himself in fear and confusion. He sees no one.

Right in his face cries a boisterous man: “-and then you get the call from the astrophysicist, who says, ‘By the way, we just had a leap second!’” It was all the Lonely Human could do not to wipe phantom spittle from his face.

A fell voice to the left incants in a tongue he knows not, and likely never will. The Lonely Human raises a hand to touch his own face. His face is cold. He examines his palm, turning it slightly to watch for light bouncing off it. There is no light, no shadow - so why can he still see his hand?

A chill runs up his back. He feels something behind him, an ominous presence he has never felt before in all his life, and a deep voice utters, “Human.”

He turns round. He sees only nothingness.

“Don’t you know how to greet an old pal?” the voice drones on. “Turn around and shake my hand…”

The voices persist, and get louder and louder. Some he understands. Many, too many, he does not. There are too many voices. And he at the centre of it all can barely take it. The fabric of noise becomes an ocean - waves and waves of tattered strings surging into his ears and spilling into the crevices of his knotted heart, then squeezed out through the orifices of his body. He chokes and cries as he drowns, but the tears don’t flow.

He scrunches up into a tight ball and closes his eyes, which changes nothing. He continues to drift off into that dark night as the voices all around torture him.

Musical Inspiration (kind of): Bohemian Rhapsody intro + ballad.
I originally wrote this on July 5th 2020. I realise it’s quite hard to uncringify something but I have done my best.