My despair

They used to alarm me, these children, these young animals, with their doll's eyes. They grab at each other, they snarl and snap, they hate everyone and are terrified of everything. What alarms me is their blankness, their lack of — a soul, for want of a better word. They have no faces you can read to tell one from the other. But who would want to stand out, to lead, in a herd like this? in a world like this? They all want to hide. I cannot blame them.

To hide, not to die. There is little despair any more. The last person to die from that unbearable condition did so a long time ago. He was my age, we were the last two left for a while, and now he too is gone...

We weren't exactly friends; he disgusted me, to tell the truth. But when there are only two of anything, they become of interest and import to each other, sooner or later. His despair was not beautiful, or even clear — the kind that so inspired me and my dear ones when we were young. We believed we had attained to the finest despair ever achieved by civilized humanity. Without imminent apocalypse, despair can only be a kind of quirk, an eccentricity, a lifestyle choice, to use that hideous expression. The world was never that bad until our time, or so we believed. In my lifetime the world became final, end-of-sentence, last word, last syllable. Then silence. To not feel that great crescendo, that certainty, at the end, was to have gone over the edge already.

I didn't appreciate it at the time. I loved my despair, it kept me alive, I had to see the end. Everyone was the same: waiting, rapt...