[Withdrawal Symptoms from Humanity, 533 words, Genre: Experimental]

* Image courtesy of Dirk de Bruyn

Edward was feeling it. The withdrawal symptoms from humanity. As he breathed in and out a deep weight fell upon his chest. Some would say it was because he smoked too many cigarettes. Others, who knew better, knew what was happening. He was experiencing it. The withdrawal symptoms from the love and intimacy of the human collective.

He lay on the couch feeling despondent to his surroundings. He looked at the clock as it slowly spun through the minutes and hours. He watched the sun rise and the sun fall. And felt nothing. The cool abyss of nothingness was as much of a shock to the system as a hammer to the head. And after all these years, that’s what he felt had happened to him. Somebody had struck him with a hammer to the head and sent him into mental retardation. It was not as if he was actually mentally a retard. It was just the fact that, in his loneliness, he could no longer relate to those around him.

Those around him had withdrawn from humanity as well. Only to experience humanity in their working lives. Through the human collective, through the shoveling of different items onto the heaping mass that was a garbage bin full of dejected feelings and human emotions.

He went to make himself a coffee. The third one for the day. Was it his third? At points he had lost count between the spoon fulls of sugar and crystalline coffee. That crystalline coffee, those granules that had been freeze dried and strained to beg for a mix of boiling water and more than a dash of milk. That caffeine that acted so effectively to gear his mind into some form of mental effort in which he would proactively seek activity and task.

He felt it… The aching of his heart. As if somebody had dug a trench in which his vital organs used to hold place. They had severed the main organs. The main arteries and taken away that which essential to his life. The functioning part of his life, that is. Everything else was not functioning. Everything else was surrounded by grey buildings with walls painted in grey paint. Those walls that were so often a reflection of his own feelings. He could cast a mirror image upon those walls and stare blankly at that which he did not understand. Or perhaps… He understood far too well. Those grey walls were what was inside him.

As he felt his soul slowly withering away from the absence of humanity he came in the realization of something. And that something was that he could have been a beautiful flower, lined up with all of the other beautiful flowers. If not for a series of misfortunate events that displaced him from his surroundings. Strangling and deterring the life that was from within him. If he had been given the food and nourishment of love, care and intimacy. He may have flourished.

But without it. Now he was just a dead flower, or surely to be one. One that was slowly wilting away. One that was transforming itself from a picturesque scene of humanity to one of death and humility.