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Devoid: An Existential Crisis; A Microcosm of Life (501 Words)
He sits, quiet, motionless, exhaustion weighing down on him like Sisyphus’boulder, dreading the thought of yet another day in the life.
He peers down at his pocket watch which is set upon his solid oak desk: 2:50 am. A self-induced dependence on caffeine pills and Red Bull fuels his relentless insomnia, which he will soon deal with by resorting to a generous dose of prescribed sleep medicine to counter the stimulants’ effects: drugs. Through deafening silence, he becomes aware of the faint sound of the gears inside his pocket watch: its linkages meshing repetitively, soothingly: destructively. He feels some sick sort of comfort from following its needles with lazy eyes as they endlessly revolve in a gentle hover overhead the timepiece’s veneer: eternal. He admires its tarnished and unpolished brass case, which despite its dullness, seems to shine next to his steel gray, colour-deprived MacBook Pro that encases so much of that which he scorns: technology.
He yawns mechanically, mentally unaffected by the toll a week’s worth of mundane and repetitive toil has burdened him with. He takes a distracted glance at his pocket watch and resolves to ingest his first sedative of the night. As he waits for the active ingredient to take effect, he thinks: attempting to piece together the unrelated, intangible thoughts that populate his degraded conscience.
He ponders life and his lack thereof: which leads to his indulging in a few brief instances of self-pity that are abruptly interrupted by an impulsive craving for nicotine. He responds to his perpetual enslavement to this substance by lighting up a cigarette, and smoking it dispassionately. Again, he takes notice of the sound of the gears in the pocket watch while mutely exhaling a mass of smoke that only partly dissipates in the cave-like room’s dense and stale air, already saturated with cigarette fumes. He listens: tick – tick – tick.
Was he too, like the pocket watch, bound to his own physical shell, doomed to endure the vicious wrath of habit and repetition? Would he cease to think, to reason; his soul degrading to a state of single purpose: to perform repetitive actions impulsively, like the gears of his pocket watch?
He told himself, no. He resolved to leave his job, his family and all of that which had led to his intellectual decline: that which would destroy him.
As he feels his heart rate increase, he extinguishes the remaining quarter of his cigarette, while feelings of hope and despair offset each other, leaving him feeling empty. Thoroughly disillusioned, he swallows his second sedative, and presses the play and repeat buttons on the dust collecting boom box he keeps by his bedside. Audible is Bob Marley’s voice chanting the words: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds […] cause none of them can stop the time”. These words are forever resonating in his soul, incapable of acting upon them, and ignorant of their meaning, he allows them to set him to sleep, like a lullaby.
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