Living Or Dead

The writer felt a sudden itch in his throat. Via the means of the built-in nervous reflexes, his vocal organs ejected a cough. Two coughs. Three.

'I wonder how many more days I can live,' he thought to himself as he shut his eyes to contemplate about his life's crisis. His ears recorded the soft but steady shower of rain battering at the extraordinarily large window occupying the entire eastern face of his rectangular room, as if it might be the last time he would ever hear those sounds again. The sounds he loved. The sounds he'd miss. A certain ribbon of pessimistic thoughts flaked off from the seabed of his mental ocean of decisions. 'Maybe I will never be able to scratch the surface. Maybe tonight is the last night I'd observe.'

Stale and bitter ideas invaded his mind. Ideas intensively influential enough to wrestle logic. He drew a deep sigh.

His eyes glanced into the horizon for a moment. The nimbus clouds were busy at work; no spectral rays of sunlight were visible right now, let alone the golden aura of a sunset that he yearned for. Grim eyes looked at parts of their own twins on the other side of the glass.

A cityscape sprawled right in front of the man's perspective. Concrete trees of residence and architectural contestants competed for supremacy in terms of height. Little did the construction workers know about the resources of freedom they had snatched from the public. A brief brisk wind walked across the roads below. Empty and idle roads that died with their hope. He caught sight of a piece of paper being hurled around by the aerial waves - a builder's blueprint.

"Great, atleast one less building to worry about," he chuckled with a smile fragranced by dark humor. He steered his attention and maneuvered his neck muscles towards the piece of paper sitting on his writing desk. "And as for my own worries... literally no ideas at all. Curse my luck."

Unable to efficiently focus, more bricks of depression added to the weight of his already towering wall overloaded with sadness.

The couple of words currently scribbled on the page was hardly a proper sentence.

'Years of strife and hardships... only to become as useless as this?!'

He rose up from his seat and courteously moved the chair aside.

Facing the glass window, he admired how tightly it had been constructed and set in place - unwavering to faint forces, impervious to any ramming attempts by the wind and immune against intrusive sounds. The contemporary design of the window impossibly relied on a single pane of glass flaunting its expanse from floor to ceiling.

'Damn, that's a seriously deadly fall,' he realized how high up his apartment was from ground level. 'If someone tried to jump out from here, I can only imagine the brutal ways gravity will torture them.'

If the piece of paper had enough an ounce of a soul embedded into its flat body, it would've tried to shout out to its master to stop. The wood grains of the table, upon which it stayed limp and lifeless, paid witness to its emotions and reactions. They wanted to save the writer from an impending doom on its way to merge into this timeline. If only they were alive.

'But whether I'm living or dead doesn't matter,' he continued, unsure where these thoughts were emanating from. He felt his mind churning up a poisonous coffee brewed with the darkest of pessimism. Any moment now, his brain would be forced to have a sip. 'My writing days are over before they even began. I am a failure. I'm so sorry, everyone... I don't exist...'

Dazed with an unknown illness, his body leaned forward. His reflection grew larger and larger against the glossy skin of the window.

Something made him stop in his tracks, however.

A hand grasped onto his own.

"Wh-what? What's this?" he spun around to meet his savior, eager and fearful to know who it might be. "Who's there?"

Before he could capture a glimpse of the unknown figure, they brutishly pressed their hands against the writer. Hands so dexterous they left blurry afterimages of their actual body part. Movements so skillfully honed sharp they seemed almost inhumane. Without warning, the person pushed the writer right at the window - with a thirsty intent to kill.

A whole bottle of adrenaline tipped over, spilling reflex energy into the writer's bloodstream from his kidneys.

"Wait, who are you? What're you—"

Innocent and helpless, the glass window shattered on impact with the writer's body. The laws of physics are partial to none, the window knew. It tried its best not to allow the writer to break through. Sadly, the fractures in its embodiment wounded its non-living soul, losing its life before the writer's off-balance body penetrated its own.

"—Holy freaking fu—aaAAAAAH!"

The writer fell.