Life is passing, and so am I. Cars pass through the night, the quiet slush of tyres on wet asphalt. The air stirs softly through my open window. I’ve been passing all day, through empty straits and the static of a dying storm. Earlier in the year a flash flood came and burst through the walls of half the buildings in town. Nothing changed. The store on the corner that sells teen clothing threw out their wares, cleaned up the place best they could, and reopened a week later. The flood was on everybody’s mind for a few days. As weeks passed, it began to dissipate, like steam rising from hot tar, or puddles in wake. Today everything was as it always was. People gathered at crossings, walked within the white lines of their existence, and stopped when the lights turned red. Cars moved automatic. Blue, white, black geometries, smelling of earth and blood and rot. People shuffled past one another. They moved in circles, repeated phantom gestures of older times. The present reorganised from the past.

I sat in the shopping mall and watched people rising from escalators. Those without friends stood motionless, like mannequins. They barely breathed, fixed their eyes on the nothingness of automatic existence. The mall is a place of noise, whiteness and stench. A pale layer coats everything. The thin sound of radio intermixes with the chatter of nearly cafe-goers, the heavy slam of a cash register cuts through the harsh hum of kinetic machinery, steps without the need to step. Everyone is passing, but going nowhere. Commodities line the windows. Electronics, homeware, food items, travel plans—experience packaged into desirable aesthetic arrangements, to be consumed and forgotten. Western empires of capital exploiting the human need to feel something during their short existence. I was here—walking the same stretch of space a thousand others have walked.

I pass in repetition. I wake, shower, eat, study, binge, sleep, fall into existential despair and contemplate jumping off a cliff, but there are no close cliffs around, so I fall back into rhythm. Wake, shower, eat, study, binge, sleep, wander the commercial district wondering why anyone moves at all, how anyone can stand these mundane repetitions, the same social greetings, unfulfilling meals, temporary binges that leave you empty of your self. I thought knowledge filled, but it empties out. It displaces—it fragments you into tiny pieces, until you find there is nothing left to grasp—intentionality turns outwards, but it’s already too late—you find you can no longer connect with anyone, or anything—they try to converse but all you can hear is their stupid voice filled with phantom lines cobbled from movies, games, sports, family events, supermarket visits, patriarchal bonding discourses, the wet tongue of capital individualism, or perhaps teeth, biting into consciousness—so you turn away, or stay silent, too afraid to confront them of their non-existence, of their worthless chatter, of their niceties, because in the end all they want is to connect, but all you hear are circuits of repetition and capital, and you wonder how they can live this way, and you can’t.

Time passes. I stumble back towards university. I jack my headphones in and pass into the nothingness of another’s consciousness. I displace myself on purpose, because I’m sick and tired of what’s left. The man at the art store tells me I get a discount for being a student. I steal a pencil. I pass through the cold air of fall. I pass an endless strip of vacant motels. I pass into my room, try to read, drink a bottle of alcohol and pass out.