(An experimental opening chapter to my next novel ‘The Collapse is Coming’)

~ Part One ~

I stood alone once again, my fragile heart somehow still beating. 

I often wondered how that thing kept working after all these years; after all the ache and pain I had put it through. Even it just cutting out for a minute would be understandable, but that beating just went defiantly on, pumping the blood through my veins, fueling my existential flame that flickered as a brief flash of light in this universe. My heart obviously had more hope in me than the rest of me did. I wasn’t doing so great, but I was still here: a crooked smile on my face and delirious thoughts wafting around my hungover head. Yes, I stood dazed and confused at the age of thirty-two, wondering where the hell I was going to head next. My life path was like that of some vagrant wandering down a dark road on the edge of town, looking at the flickering lights of cheap hotels and wondering in which one he could momentarily rest before drifting on some more. It seemed that the youthful me who had fervently chased his dreams had changed to this sullen drifter of the night – a man simply searching for some shelter, rather than some grand haven; a man no longer trying to climb a mountain, but just summoning the strength to get out of bed; a man no longer trying to write some great novel, but just scribbling down a few simple sentences. My god, what was I even becoming? I looked in the mirror and wanted to behold those eyes that stared fiercely back at me in my twenties, but such a life was now something seemingly buried in the past. The merciless dagger of time had taken its swing, and what was I but yet another man secretly bleeding out before everyone’s eyes.

My melancholy wasn’t helped by the fact that my girlfriend of two years had recently left me and moved to Spain. It had been coming for a while as a looming sense of inevitability hung over us once the honeymoon period had cleared, and I realised staying together would require me to change something within myself that just couldn’t be changed.

I thought back to the moment I crashed her car as she was trying to get me to finally learn to drive. Lessons were progressing, aided by the fact that she was letting me practice in her car. And then one day, I went to pull off from a busy street, and instead of putting my foot on the brake, I just pushed down on the accelerator and drove us straight into the parked car in front of us. A harsh atmosphere covered us as she and her dog looked at me in abject fear. The moment was telling: my broken brain once again malfunctioning and stopping me from doing something that was considered fundamental to being a functional adult.

There were other things: personality clashes, differing social classes, but the true break was children. The thought of having children for me was something akin to learning Mandarin; it wasn’t something that was even on my horizon, nor ever would be. Maybe there was something wrong with me, but I simply had no desire to procreate. Hell, even if I did, common sense would have stopped me from doing so. I saw the horror of the world at the present moment and looked with sympathy at those screaming kids, totally unaware of the inferno they were about to enter as the house of cards that we had built swayed and toppled over. A hurricane was coming, fuelled by unsustainable capitalism, climate change, AI, social media, and the general breakdown of civilisation that was so obviously happening to anyone who didn’t have their head buried in their smartphone. I didn’t buy the talk that you could change the world with your own children; if I were to spawn some miniature version of myself and try to raise them to be good, I knew it would be an act of cruelty. Looking at the current state of the world, I was confident any good-hearted, sane person in the future would be an anxious, alienated individual surviving on pills and alcohol before eventually dying alone in some rat-infested box room. I could even see the beginning of the end now with more tents appearing every day along the local river. More and more people were falling off the edge with the runaway rent prices. The Blade Runner years awaited as the lower classes scraped for tins of beans and the rich lived in heavily-guarded pleasure domes, using up the last bits of energy as the lower classes rotted in the stinking wasteland.

I was walking along that river now, watching the mother push the prams ever forward into that dystopian future, and reflecting back to the times when me and my ex walked her dog in the same spots. My solemn reflection was abruptly interrupted when I was approached by one of the homeless men who lived in one of the tents. I recognised him; I often saw him stumbling around the city in a high-vis jacket, long blonde beard, and wild blue eyes. I assumed he would ask me for money, but he asked me if I could play AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ on my phone. Naturally, I obliged and put it on for him. We then walked for a while as he continued asking me questions and erratically flipping between subjects. The guy was incoherent and not making much sense, but I didn’t judge him for it; not many people did.

I eventually felt bad for the poor bastard and went to buy him some booze and cigarettes from the local shop. I handed over the money to the cashier, noticing that I was getting kinder towards homeless people as I got older (perhaps a part of me felt that the roles would be reversed in the near future and I was trying to gain some good karma before my turn in the gutter came). I exited the store, gave him his items, and wished him good luck. I even said “god bless”, despite being a non-believer.

Soon I arrived home and cracked open one of my own beers. I sat there in silence in the garden, zoning out and sipping my drink. It was a sunny afternoon in October and I was trying to soak in some of that last warmth before the winter came. The dying leaves fell around me and I watched one float from side to side, twirling down before finally landing on the grass beneath my feet. I looked at it for a second, admiring its golden flames. Then I saw a wasp. It was crawling beside the leaf and eventually crawled on top of it. I was expecting it to get up and fly away, but it just stayed there on the dying leaf for a while before eventually carrying on, stumbling through the grass. It quickly became obvious to me that the wasp was dying too. Summer was over, and this lawn was a battlefield with the last remaining survivors. I then turned to look at the table beside me. I had my laptop with me and I could see my reflection on the screen. Thirty-two years old, I could see myself aging rapidly before my eyes. The forehead lines were more prominent than ever, and my eyes looked tired and defeated. This is the way of the seasons, I thought to myself. Death and decay were inevitable, and I looked back at the wasp and felt a comradeship with the dying creature. Our fate was the same. We were all staggering through life, enduring the seasons, falling to the floor, being made weaker and weaker before finally finding a suitable place to die.