Genesis

"The problem - the one and only problem ever possible - is that there is -", said the old man, stopping dead. The noise behind his voice also stopped, like a tape recording coming to it's end. I looked up and the man's eyes were devoid of life, serving as mirrors; that's when I became aware of my body, realized I'm on my back, sat up and unexpectedly bumped into a membrane, ripping the paper the man was printed on. "Did I kill him?", I first thought, but quickly felt trapped in a joke, ashamed, looking around; God forbid I took the idea of killing symbolically serious. The atmosphere I got into felt humid and dense, and the paper dissolved into it, erasing any trace of the happening. I'm just sure that what I saw and heard was real, if only I can distort that term to embrace that event... Just a little tweak will do. I always thought I was good at reading the silences, but this time I was so trapped into the discussion that my expectation for the end of the sentence became me. Was the sudden silence really the end? Was the dead stop intentional, giving the listener an open opportunity to fill in? Did I just misunderstood a full sentence for one that felt unfinished? I tried to flow, but simple mistakes end up putting a tag on me forcibly. Again having to clean up the game, seems like the user failed.

 

"The problem - the one and only problem ever possible - is that there is... ". When I felt the silence longer than the previous ones, I looked up, and the old man was frozen, looking straight into the layer that most people think is the present but is just their skin. Did he say the rest? Was I distracted by either internal or external noise? Every second from that moment, the memory loses sharpness and is polluted with flashes of cerebral activity, and emotional debris that consumes the details. The body needs rest by now, but the holding of the event becomes an obsession. "Maybe I missed the end", I cry inside. Well, I don't seem to have a pause to think, I can only walk around the puzzle, observing from every angle. From there, the man looks like an abstract figure, like a bad 3D render, glitched to every side, that vaguely looks like a man only from the first angle; needless to say, the notion of what happened is by now well a simple fantasy that could never again be expressed, even artistically. I don't think I have the actual energy to restart.

The writer kept losing her mind over punctuation, something felt off every time she ran the program.

"I better get it right soon, this technology will expire any time".