You get up. You don’t get up. You lie awake. You close your eyes. You wonder what it might be like to die. Or, to be just dead. You put your buzzing, stupid head out of the window. The breeze catches the little hairs on your chin, the smells from the Chinese downstairs float up and surround you. A seagull drives by in the air, squealing at the wheelie bins. Its life is harder.

You may wonder how you got here. How did it happen? What have you done that’s so bad? Did you commit genocide or something?

Did you help Herod on his midnight jaunts? Or was Genghis your God?

You clench your jaw and get dressed. You are not sure why you get dressed: the outside holds no pleasures for you.  There are humans out there, humans who might want to communicate.

The street is grey and wet and long. Buses and cars speed by, moving your hair, disturbing the bones in your face. You walk into the centre of town, more awake now. As you wake, your face moves a bit, your eyes notice things. You see women who are pleasing to your moving eyes. You see other things too. You walk on the November grass, green but wet and muddy. There are millions or trillions of leaves on the ground, abandoned by their trees. The wind blows them up and the smell of dead leaves fills your head, a good, strong smell. The summer is fine, but does not possess the strength, the brown power of autumn.

You sit on a metal bench. The wooden ones are long-gone now, mossy, lichened, graffiti-ed, burnt. A group of young people is playing football, noisily. You watch them with eyes that burn in that acid brown dying aroma. Decay is good. Death can be good, you think. You muse, as the footballers are louder. You muse that the sky is full of it, death. You reflect that you wish you were there. Not in the sky, where there is no heaven or anything else but clouds and deep space and asteroids and cosmonauts, but in the ground when relief will come. It will to you, you know. Will it be a blessed day, when all falls away, ceasing to be of any importance? Yes. Will people miss you, will they remark upon your death? Probably not. There is no-one.