Chapter 2; my chapters are relatively short.

With utter disgust, he walked from the window. No wish to continue gazing upon the faint, dancing figures on the horizon; figures, entities that never really moved, but rather seemed to transcend, or transgress, the bounds of space. Quivering equivocally, never quite moving, yet never still. Today they seemed closer… More tangible than the distant blurs, easily confused with mirages; yet no light seemed to penetrate the atmosphere now.

“Enough of that…” He muttered somewhat uselessly, “…Another day of overcast, another day without sun… Another day like any other,” he resentfully whined to no one in particular.

He hurriedly walked toward his room, not to sleep, but just to stare at his place of resting with an unnatural hilarity that now inevitably precede his melancholy realizations… His insomnia, in recent times, had grown increasingly worse; sleep deprivation and life were, at least in his eyes, inseparable. Weary though he was, the idea of even trying failed to cross his mind, despite proximity… …Everything was so far away now, distant and cold. Almost humbled by perspective, yet nonetheless somber in its own right, the image, though wholly familiar, still seemed alien and uninviting.

All this, this collage of practically opaque solemnity, was irrelevant. He, through his months, maybe years, of exposure, had been desensitized; he had become the ultimate stoic, and he knew it… As such, not a tear fell from his insipid orbs of perception.

“Ugh…” A barely audible moan of malcontent, of distaste, escaped his chapped lips, filling the silent void with a reverberating ghost of enunciation.

Slowly trotting toward his bathroom, he noticed the resistancy that met his feet that seemed fathoms below him. At first he assumed it was simply fatigue, but he knew that friend well; this was different. Glancing at his feet, to his perplexing amusement, he saw an odd, black muck, so viscous he considered retying his shoes. Emanating from no particular location, impossibly slow ripples crept acrost its perceivably lightless surface. Absolutely featureless – the only way he could descry be it… Pointless, as he really spoke to no one. Remnants of his pre-hermitic state, one would guess.

Opening the cabinet above his sink with a creak that quite literally forced him to quiver to the bone, he stared at the many prescriptions and non-descript drugs it housed. Picking up the nearest neuro-depressant he could get his hands on, he ripped open the bottle and down enough to kill a good-sized dog, in a more than likely vain effort to get a moment’s sleep. As he stumbled toward his bed, partially due to the ambiguous sludge below him and partially from the narcotics, his vision began to tunnel and swirl. His stomach felt like it was doing cartwheels, and there was a distinct, audible ringing, not necessarily from any direction. Much to his own surprise, he welcomed such drug-induced hallucinations, as opposed to his ‘normal’ (if that word was even applicable to any aspect of his life at this point) delusions.

Collapsing on his bed, to his complete astonishment, and unimaginable horror, those indiscrete, warbling figures were just feet from him, no more defined than before. The terror that seized his entire thoracic cavity felt as though it would constrict his breathing, tighten its grip, until he asphyxiated. He tried to scream, tried to move, but the tranquilizers seemed to have paralyzed every muscle in his frail, emaciated body. His quiet, uneventful death seemed just minutes away, imminently and forebodingly marching toward him… And the only coherent thought to pass through his demented mind, “Maybe I’ll finally get some rest…”