The end of the whole mess.

It’s hard to image the world was once animate, bursting with life and opportunity for those willing enough to go out and find it. Even the monotonous drone of traffic and the hustle and bustle of day-trippers is a welcome, returning memory.  It’s all gone now, everything’s ... gone. It stands silent. Even the birds will stop chirping soon. They have to. It’s inevitable.

            Sitting on the shore of a long forgotten lake on the outskirts of New York, surrounded by grass long since left untended and weeds running rampant, my thoughts turn to better days. Even the cold in the air sends me into raptures.

            Once, a long time ago, I’d thought of my life on this very piece of land overlooking this very vista. I think I’d been about eighteen or so, not that it matters. I’d imagined my life back then (my future life), and I imagined myself with a wife and child, maybe a house I would eventually one day own, but all that has gone now – reduced to dust and tears.

            Still, the silence gives me a time to reflect that I never found before. In that bubble of silence, I think about things a little closer to my past. Our past. There I think about lives we once led before the great extinction. We wasted so much of it, that’s what I would say if there was another someone here to hear me. We lived so much of it through invisible networks, Wi-Fi, and a series of photographs we never stopped long enough to take for ourselves. Each ticked, appreciated, and shared.

            We wasted so much, and we never saw it happen ... or if we did we saw it through the lens of a camera or the update of friend.

            Oh, how much time passes when we are not looking. We don’t care enough for it until it’s gone, believing, instead, to live our lives through the eyes of another. But the clock of our lives keeps on ticking, winding down until there’s nothing left.

Only then, when the clock has stopped ticking, will we miss and regret the time we never spent taking in the scent of a rose or the cheer of a stranger’s smile or, more precisely, the fulfillment of a dream.