staring into the sun

You're standing in line at Trader Joe's, awash in tiny shopping noises. Sickly florescents flicker commercially overhead. You look up. You look down. You look across, pierce a stranger's soul, and comedy of the universe erupts in your mind.

It's impossibly sudden, a towering stack of moments all served at once. Without warning or permission, your entire life is thrown into violent relief, its absolute emptiness laid naked before your eyes. Shame crashes down as the scale of its waste sinks in. You can't remember the last decision you made, you lament the will you never exercised. A bland sequence. Events arising merely to happen. Stumbling blindly forward, a rock tumbling downhill. Imagining freedom while recycling a pathetic set of automatic rules you gathered by accident along the way.

A parade unfolds, mocking you with sick contempt. The lists of who you like and who you don't, shredded confetti. The preferences you cling to for arbitrary definition, flaunting their pretend coherence, trampling your identity underfoot. With a terrible sight whose eyes cannot close, you trace your every opinion's true source - thoughts and actions blithely incepted by neighboring forces, themselves headless shoulders jostling in a grotesque cosmic circus.

The meaning is sucked of out the air, a quiet vacuum settles. You're unraveling at the border, shrinking into nothingness, disappearing with a cartoon *pop*.

You no longer exist.