Amongst the creeping dread, bloodshot eyes, and senses thick with something rotting, living on the second floor of reality is the center of agony. Everything here is defined by bitterness. The people sitting in this room are so full of darkness that they carry radioactive masses of absence within them, shadows living off the chests of their bodies. The cold, fresh, glistening wind somehow finds its way into this labyrinth, searches for the ones trapped amongst these masses, and dies within them, still lingering. Bare windows cut into the walls cannot compensate for the absence of air, cannot undo the damage already done. Balconies offer a view down to what life on the other side looks and feels like. The prisoners must at least see what life looks like before dying. Time inside this capsule moves slower than outside, making sure the blood feels its most alive, most rushing, right before it stops moving at all. With no clocks on the walls, the heartbeat itself ticks like a time bomb, ready to detonate at any moment, needles aligning to a set hour no one can read. And without any clock to watch, the dying might never know, might never realize, exactly when their end will come.
But if we just look outside, at the blue sky, at the green grass below, if we shed this sheath of a reality for just a moment, we can pretend we are here for a reception. That we could go out for a walk, and a breakfast under the open sky, the way the unagonized ones are supposed to. The way you do when you find enough fresh air to bury the burdens and simply breathe. We can pretend it will never end, that we are living inside some gentle virtuality. You might want to live inside that Matrix for a while, if only it stops reminding you there is nothing ahead.
But we could look forward. For something. Far off.
