fuck this. with an immensely overwhelming sense of boredom, i spend my days in bed, growing ever more intimate with my sheets—sheets i haven’t washed in a month, darkened by my sweat, dirt, and grime. i don’t know what the almighty god thinks of me; i suspect he doesn’t know either. if he did, maybe he’d feel sorry, maybe he’d extend a helping hand. but i guess he’s been too busy partying with angels for centuries to spare a moment for his mortals.
for some reason, in the imagination of patriarchal societies, it doesn’t sound ironic at all that our one and only god—our great father—who, out of his infinite generosity, deigned to breathe his soul into us, is off having fun with angels. a god was supposed to be like this anyway. culture decreed it so.
and we are condemned to live in a world that has been decreed this way. it’s strange—this thought has been gnawing at my mind for a while, stabbing me like a needle from the inside: “being condemned to live.” maybe if some dumbass said this on tiktok, or an old uncle obsessed with giving life advice, or a psychologist throwing out aphorisms in a tedx talk as if they had unlocked the secrets of the universe, i’d say, “fuck off.” because it sounds like one of those empty, pseudo-deep phrases about the meaninglessness of life. all of this bothers me so much. it feels like adele clones have surrounded me, screaming rolling in the deep at the top of their lungs.
you wake up in the morning. you stare at the ceiling for a while, brain completely empty. then, before your head starts burning, you light a cigarette, prepare some breakfast to keep your bodily functions running, and eat. or you don’t—what does it matter? then you get up, fix your appearance, put on some perfume, and step outside as the dawn breaks. when you get on the bus, you blend into the mass of human cargo, lost among your fellow prisoners, heading to work so the capitalists can fatten their wallets a little more.
you spend your shift dealing with a few pitifully brainless creatures who go by the title “manager,” trying to keep your sanity intact. then you make the journey back with your fellow prisoners, returning to your bachelor pad that has acquired a unique stench from your exhaustion. you scroll through social media for a while, fall asleep comparing your life to others’, and in the morning, the same story repeats. and we are forced to live. we are condemned to this, just to keep on living.
everything flows as if dictated by some eternal law: the sun rises, people are born, grow up, work, resent, marry, divorce, sometimes kill, sometimes die. and in all this chaos, the fact that nobody cares that i’m rotting in my sheets doesn’t strike me as strange. even god doesn’t care—why should people?
or maybe people do care. maybe someone’s been worried because they haven’t heard from me in days. maybe my phone has rung countless times. maybe someone has knocked on my door, but i didn’t hear. maybe the neighbors have complained—“that guy in the apartment across the hall, is he dead or what? it’s starting to smell.”
because the weird thing is—it really does smell.
something is off in this room. mingling with the usual sour scent of sweat and cigarette smoke from my sheets, there’s something else. metallic. rotten. even a bit sweet. i lift my head and look around, but everything seems the same—messy, dusty, dull. but the smell—it’s here.
i inhale. it’s unusually thick, like the scent of something hot and damp mixed with mildew. i haven’t even cooked anything—i haven’t set foot in the kitchen for weeks. i stand up and walk around the room, but wherever i go, the smell follows me. in fact, it gets stronger with every step.
then i notice something.
a faint, almost imperceptible dark red trail has seeped from under my bed onto the carpet. i touch it with my finger. it’s sticky. is this… blood?
i bend down and peer under the bed. and in that moment, my stomach knots.
there, in the darkness, staring back at me with vacant eyes, is a pale face. a rigid, decaying body. my body.
me?
no. no, this isn’t possible. i blink, i recoil, my breathing turns erratic. but the image doesn’t change. there, under my bed, lies someone identical to me—just a few weeks older, a few weeks deader.
my hands tremble. the room feels hotter. the smell is suffocating now.
and suddenly, i understand. i wasn’t condemned to live.
i have been dead all along.
and god, just as expected, still doesn’t care.
to read second chapter top here
