A/N:Random oneshot written very late at night. The narrator is no one in particular.
The world is breaking down.
It's made of static leaking in through all the cracks—a glitching computer screen. It's all errors, and loops, and false fronts. The input is all wrong.
Take a word and say it—or type it—or read it—over and over and over again. It stops being the word you thought you started with. It stops being a word at all. I had a point with that—I don't remember anymore.
Have you ever looked out the window when it's raining—late at night—all the headlights on the streets turning into some blurred mass of something? Everything in neat and scrambled little lines—bad static on the airways. Everything tuned to the wrong frequency. Everything fuzzy. It melts, you know. You look at it too hard—for too long—it melts.
Have you ever seen the sky melt—?
Do you wonder if it's still there when you close your eyes? If maybe it's only there because you see it? If you blink—are you—still there? I dreamed the world was gone and I was standing in the middle of the waves—static and sound. Radio waves. Broken, shoddy, radio waves. I blinked.
What are we? If we are—? If we—?
If—?
I got on the train today. There was nobody there. The lights went out in a tunnel—no lights at all. The sound that was the white noise never changed or went away. I put my hand out and waited to feel it hit the window, hit the glass—kept waiting. The lights came on before I touched it. I stopped waiting. I never touched it.
I never touched it.
Everything is missing pieces—pieces so small you can't tell which are gone and which are there—and which are shoddy replacements for what should be and isn't there anymore. I think my mind is losing—something. I'm losing—my mind?
It's still raining outside the window and the drops are too thin—transparent. I can't see my reflection in the dark. We're going in circles.
Have you ever reached for a light switch and wondered—for a moment—if there will be anything there when that light comes on? That moment of panic when you think you could—think you could almost see the—the—the—
Where do we go from here? Passing faces down the street in the fog—the world is empty. No—no, not empty—can't be empty. But what if—under everything—there's just nothing—there? What if they're all lying to us? Who is lying? What is—?
What was I trying to say?
What if there is no one else? If this is not real, are you? Can I turn you all off like a light switch—like a candle flame? When I blink, are you—when I blink? When I blink? Maybe the glitch is in my mind. I'm not here. The lights are still off—I can't feel the glass. Where are we now, if not here? If we're gone.
Where are we now?