Alone
John felt the control return to him and his sight focussed in on the sights of the fit, visions of which he'd rather not see. His wildly spasming arms flailed at the floor before their pace slowed and they once more fell under John's administration. His flapping mouth began to stop snapping at the tendered meat of his lax tongue. Once again, John was in charge of his body and used the regained mastery to pick himself up, take a couple of tablets from his pocket and down them with a glass of water, which would prevent another fit from happening too soon and would wash away the bitter copper taste of pennies that now lurked in his numbed mouth.
The epileptic fits were a constant hassle for John, but he'd learnt to live with them and the pills would keep such instances to a minimum. Usually, though a sense of dizziness would take hold and John would feel lost in a very much familiar place until his bearings were restored and the feelings subsided. However, the feeling of being lost and bewildered was more nagging then it had ever been, though he was most certainly in his own kitchen, in his own apartment. The door to his left would surely lead to his balcony, and the door behind him to his living room. But, behind the defined walls of the room lurked something dreadful, something of anxiety and hatred. Something different. John shunned these callous sensations and opened the door that would lead on to the living room. Or, at the very least, was supposed to.
The door opened up onto vistas of undeniable, infinite dark reaches that filled his eyes and mind with its bleak objection to existence until John was capable of using all his resolve and resilience in an effort to withdraw himself from such unholy views of raw negativity and slam the door to them. John fell to the ground; feeling drained from his efforts to close the door to the dark abomination but ignored this for the overwhelming sense of confusion. Was he dreaming this as his mind had disconnected from his body in the midst of an epileptic convulsion? He didn't dare open the door to see if reality had reformed itself within his living room, choosing instead to sit down on the floor for sometime, in deep thought until his confusion had faded away.
John picked himself up and plucked up his courage once more, unsure whether or not he was undergoing reality before denying that any of this could be real. He clasped the door handle and pulled the door open.
Before the disorientated man lay his Living Room in ordered fashion, with its windows looking out onto a busy New York street sixteen floors below and its furniture in a disarrayed fashion, huddled mostly around the TV. John stepped towards one of the windows, to take a glance outside into the night to see if life were indeed still running. He scarcely got past opening the window when he felt something amiss. But when he drew his hand back from the cold, fogged window pane, the glass refused to stay put. Instead, it left with his hand until he'd pulled it back a full foot at which point it snapped back into place like rubber. With a gasp that sounded like steam hissing, John threw himself away from the window, tumbling over his chair and crashing through the floor, which tore under his weight with a noise like paper being ripped for the floor itself now had the consistency of paper.
And John fell and continued to fall through the dark abyss until he felt himself become suspended, or so he assumed. John discovered quickly that he was not, but was in fact grounded, though it lacked any almighty crash or even a thud. He simply was on the ground once more in the immeasurable darkness he had witnessed from the doorway before. Except this time, he could move. And run. And run far away from whatever abominations lurked within the shroud that he was sure were tumbling up the stygian black to take him. And in this madness that he was trapped, John did run.
To where he ran, he did not know. To what he reached, he was not sure. The time that was gone was of no interest to him. After running from the infinite dark in which he was confined he had found something, un-tainted by the infernal null void which encompassed all. A door frame. A simple, white-washed, wooden door frame. Its purpose of being here seemed all to illogical, but John was sure his purpose in this unhallowed dark conflicted with logic. However, one thing John was certain of; that a door leads somewhere, even if it leads into solid brick, it leads into something more substantial then a pool of dark-matter. John was unsure of where the door would lead him, but when he opened it, pushing himself through it hastily on impulse, he understood what the door led to. He knew where the other side was and he knew that he desperately did not want to be there. Before he could truly react though, it struck him and his encounter with it was to be his end.
The next day, John was found. A man in ragged clothes with a rugged face, reeking of alcohol had found his remnants but had left him shortly after, leaving him to the endless solitude of his personal oblivion. John no longer cared of people though, as in his new circumstances, he was not to know another face except that of the blank darkness forever staring back into his still, glassy eyes. Whatever he had done to deserve an eternal nothingness, forever in a paraplegic state of waking dream he did not know but it was the way of the universe. The way of reality. Humankind was born alone and would die alone. In the darkness. In the void. In the eternity. John would forever be held in the clutches of darkness, forever in a stasis of a death beyond life, beyond anything man had conjured up to be prepared for the afterlife. John had never been particularly philosophical, but, when there came a time that the darkness was accustomed with his presence and he with its lawful chaos, thoughts formed in his mind that had been still for several lifetimes. Thoughts of regrets and of sorrows, though not for his own life but for the existence of humanity. Someday, Human-kind would be extinct, and all that would be left would be skeletons of people and of buildings. The human race would be some 'bedtime story' for some other evolving being to take its place and repeat its follies and to bury the scars of the old with scars of the new. He thought of these things, and loathed them. The Earth would be just a non-diverse cycle of monotonous occurrences. May those dark beings from beyond have mercy to the pitiful place when he and his lame, blind brother and his sister in the trinity of life, death and time, rise upon it from their dead slumbers, awoken by their Priests who shall relieve the world of its ridiculous monotony and replace it with the chaotic laws of which John now followed.
Back where John had fallen though, journalists had turned up, pushing and shoving and wriggling like fish brought upon a deck against the medical officers who were scraping up John and putting the bits into a plastic bag, as they had done for many others before John who had fallen from buildings. Some journalists realised how little they would learn from this and turned to neighbours and people living in the general area and to relatives and family and, 'for the juicy bits' known as filler, people who never met the man and were simply in charge of "the cities finest" or "John Kuraine's Doctor" or "Joe Blogg". They may as well have just pulled 'Edward Delapoor' or 'Randy Charter' or anyone of the streets, told them the story and asked for their opinions, which they no doubt did.
John cared little for their actions though. He cared little for anything anymore.
Eventually, the squabbling masses labelled journalists and reporters calmed down over 'the sensational story' and gave it a small article on any page in some small gazette having believed to have gotten their facts right. What they had extracted from the nosy neighbour across the street, who had been watching the events with horror from her binoculars (but had neglected to even pick up her phone until the next day whilst everyone was poking around the scene.), was that John Kuraine had tugged his Balcony Door open and run through the balcony's fence. Only being human though, the Press discounted the fact that he had run through the balcony because they were sure his concerned neighbour (whom he had never in fact met) had only thought she'd seen a man run through it, from the shock of actually seeing a man jump from his balcony so swiftly.
John no longer cared about the events of that night though. On the grand scale of the eternity, it mattered nothing more then that it had brought him to his current situation. In the dark. Alone.
Having spoken with the man's doctor, psychiatrist and parents, the Press had discovered the man to have been suffering from a multitude of psychological disorders, mostly involving his sleep. He was a schizophrenic, a narcoleptic and suffered from hideous attacks of night- terrors, where he had been seen striking violently out against unseen attackers and to flail madly, all whilst asleep. Upon waking, no matter how thorough psychological probing was, his nightmares had never been controlled, understood or even recalled by the patient himself. And now, there would be no understanding of the madness inside his subconscious, for he had died within the boundaries of sleep, unprotected, unguarded and alone.
And now John cared not for being in the sole company of himself. He had, would have and underwent millennia of loneliness in the unconventional, unknown laws of a dark, shadow-land with no boundaries of time and space and logic.
John felt the control return to him and his sight focussed in on the sights of the fit, visions of which he'd rather not see. His wildly spasming arms flailed at the floor before their pace slowed and they once more fell under John's administration. His flapping mouth began to stop snapping at the tendered meat of his lax tongue. Once again, John was in charge of his body and used the regained mastery to pick himself up, take a couple of tablets from his pocket and down them with a glass of water, which would prevent another fit from happening too soon and would wash away the bitter copper taste of pennies that now lurked in his numbed mouth.
The epileptic fits were a constant hassle for John, but he'd learnt to live with them and the pills would keep such instances to a minimum. Usually, though a sense of dizziness would take hold and John would feel lost in a very much familiar place until his bearings were restored and the feelings subsided. However, the feeling of being lost and bewildered was more nagging then it had ever been, though he was most certainly in his own kitchen, in his own apartment. The door to his left would surely lead to his balcony, and the door behind him to his living room. But, behind the defined walls of the room lurked something dreadful, something of anxiety and hatred. Something different. John shunned these callous sensations and opened the door that would lead on to the living room. Or, at the very least, was supposed to.
The door opened up onto vistas of undeniable, infinite dark reaches that filled his eyes and mind with its bleak objection to existence until John was capable of using all his resolve and resilience in an effort to withdraw himself from such unholy views of raw negativity and slam the door to them. John fell to the ground; feeling drained from his efforts to close the door to the dark abomination but ignored this for the overwhelming sense of confusion. Was he dreaming this as his mind had disconnected from his body in the midst of an epileptic convulsion? He didn't dare open the door to see if reality had reformed itself within his living room, choosing instead to sit down on the floor for sometime, in deep thought until his confusion had faded away.
John picked himself up and plucked up his courage once more, unsure whether or not he was undergoing reality before denying that any of this could be real. He clasped the door handle and pulled the door open.
Before the disorientated man lay his Living Room in ordered fashion, with its windows looking out onto a busy New York street sixteen floors below and its furniture in a disarrayed fashion, huddled mostly around the TV. John stepped towards one of the windows, to take a glance outside into the night to see if life were indeed still running. He scarcely got past opening the window when he felt something amiss. But when he drew his hand back from the cold, fogged window pane, the glass refused to stay put. Instead, it left with his hand until he'd pulled it back a full foot at which point it snapped back into place like rubber. With a gasp that sounded like steam hissing, John threw himself away from the window, tumbling over his chair and crashing through the floor, which tore under his weight with a noise like paper being ripped for the floor itself now had the consistency of paper.
And John fell and continued to fall through the dark abyss until he felt himself become suspended, or so he assumed. John discovered quickly that he was not, but was in fact grounded, though it lacked any almighty crash or even a thud. He simply was on the ground once more in the immeasurable darkness he had witnessed from the doorway before. Except this time, he could move. And run. And run far away from whatever abominations lurked within the shroud that he was sure were tumbling up the stygian black to take him. And in this madness that he was trapped, John did run.
To where he ran, he did not know. To what he reached, he was not sure. The time that was gone was of no interest to him. After running from the infinite dark in which he was confined he had found something, un-tainted by the infernal null void which encompassed all. A door frame. A simple, white-washed, wooden door frame. Its purpose of being here seemed all to illogical, but John was sure his purpose in this unhallowed dark conflicted with logic. However, one thing John was certain of; that a door leads somewhere, even if it leads into solid brick, it leads into something more substantial then a pool of dark-matter. John was unsure of where the door would lead him, but when he opened it, pushing himself through it hastily on impulse, he understood what the door led to. He knew where the other side was and he knew that he desperately did not want to be there. Before he could truly react though, it struck him and his encounter with it was to be his end.
The next day, John was found. A man in ragged clothes with a rugged face, reeking of alcohol had found his remnants but had left him shortly after, leaving him to the endless solitude of his personal oblivion. John no longer cared of people though, as in his new circumstances, he was not to know another face except that of the blank darkness forever staring back into his still, glassy eyes. Whatever he had done to deserve an eternal nothingness, forever in a paraplegic state of waking dream he did not know but it was the way of the universe. The way of reality. Humankind was born alone and would die alone. In the darkness. In the void. In the eternity. John would forever be held in the clutches of darkness, forever in a stasis of a death beyond life, beyond anything man had conjured up to be prepared for the afterlife. John had never been particularly philosophical, but, when there came a time that the darkness was accustomed with his presence and he with its lawful chaos, thoughts formed in his mind that had been still for several lifetimes. Thoughts of regrets and of sorrows, though not for his own life but for the existence of humanity. Someday, Human-kind would be extinct, and all that would be left would be skeletons of people and of buildings. The human race would be some 'bedtime story' for some other evolving being to take its place and repeat its follies and to bury the scars of the old with scars of the new. He thought of these things, and loathed them. The Earth would be just a non-diverse cycle of monotonous occurrences. May those dark beings from beyond have mercy to the pitiful place when he and his lame, blind brother and his sister in the trinity of life, death and time, rise upon it from their dead slumbers, awoken by their Priests who shall relieve the world of its ridiculous monotony and replace it with the chaotic laws of which John now followed.
Back where John had fallen though, journalists had turned up, pushing and shoving and wriggling like fish brought upon a deck against the medical officers who were scraping up John and putting the bits into a plastic bag, as they had done for many others before John who had fallen from buildings. Some journalists realised how little they would learn from this and turned to neighbours and people living in the general area and to relatives and family and, 'for the juicy bits' known as filler, people who never met the man and were simply in charge of "the cities finest" or "John Kuraine's Doctor" or "Joe Blogg". They may as well have just pulled 'Edward Delapoor' or 'Randy Charter' or anyone of the streets, told them the story and asked for their opinions, which they no doubt did.
John cared little for their actions though. He cared little for anything anymore.
Eventually, the squabbling masses labelled journalists and reporters calmed down over 'the sensational story' and gave it a small article on any page in some small gazette having believed to have gotten their facts right. What they had extracted from the nosy neighbour across the street, who had been watching the events with horror from her binoculars (but had neglected to even pick up her phone until the next day whilst everyone was poking around the scene.), was that John Kuraine had tugged his Balcony Door open and run through the balcony's fence. Only being human though, the Press discounted the fact that he had run through the balcony because they were sure his concerned neighbour (whom he had never in fact met) had only thought she'd seen a man run through it, from the shock of actually seeing a man jump from his balcony so swiftly.
John no longer cared about the events of that night though. On the grand scale of the eternity, it mattered nothing more then that it had brought him to his current situation. In the dark. Alone.
Having spoken with the man's doctor, psychiatrist and parents, the Press had discovered the man to have been suffering from a multitude of psychological disorders, mostly involving his sleep. He was a schizophrenic, a narcoleptic and suffered from hideous attacks of night- terrors, where he had been seen striking violently out against unseen attackers and to flail madly, all whilst asleep. Upon waking, no matter how thorough psychological probing was, his nightmares had never been controlled, understood or even recalled by the patient himself. And now, there would be no understanding of the madness inside his subconscious, for he had died within the boundaries of sleep, unprotected, unguarded and alone.
And now John cared not for being in the sole company of himself. He had, would have and underwent millennia of loneliness in the unconventional, unknown laws of a dark, shadow-land with no boundaries of time and space and logic.
