AXIS

A story begins here, and you will read it. You will have thoughts that oppose one another, and some that breathe in unison. Will you place yourself within this short story, or will you read it as though peering through a window? However, you choose to see the young bookseller in this tale is up to you—but consider this: how will her existential dread and cycle of overthinking compel you to keep reading?

This is Part 1 of The Thinker and The Thought.
Read well, and read consciously.
Enjoy.

The sun blinded your eyes as you awoke from what people call slumber, but you seem to think it’s the stage before death. As when you lie in the sheets with sweat and salt and are barely conscious, breathing rate so close to a halt that a swift strike can send you over the edge. How can people call it slumber when death is so much closer?

Anyway, where were you… Yes, waking from near death and the feeling of loneliness now consuming you whole. It’s not like there was someone before the sweat and the salt; however, you miss it, you miss something that you have never had. Is that possible to feel such dread and loss of something that has never been yours? The feeling when you look upon Jane or Ben with their significant other in the cafe that is just across from your flat, smiling, laughing, and nuzzling into one another and wishing that was something you had, missing it. Is that feeling real, or is your imagination running wild because of the lack of purpose your heart has? Other than keeping you alive, your heart has no use, you think.

Well, you don’t know, so you just stare at Jane or Ben and envy them because that feeling is just way too familiar to you.

As a Christian, you’re told not to be envious of others but that’s all you can feel and guilt rushes over you, as you feel that you are not close to your faith enough to be rid of this emotion as you have so much of it within you and you just don’t know what to do with it. With all this circulating your mind palace, you laugh to yourself as you don’t know if their names are even Jane or Ben, because who are you to name a body and soul just on appearance alone? Even though she does look like a plain Jane and he a chirpy Ben, it is not up to you to name them because she could be a Serena and he a Mario or Cassius. What then mhhm… ah yes, you will look like the idiot you once were and will always be. 

Realising that you have done this again – daydream if you want to be a juvenile. You flash back to your room and get rid of the mental space that once dragged you across its floors, and you look at the sun that is blinding you, smelling the sweat and salt that has contaminated the air, and you wonder, oh, you wonder beyond because that is just what you’re hopelessly good at. Will today be different from yesterday? But you don’t want to get your hopes up because that’s too much to bear for you. Isn’t it?