Walking alone, watching my shadow merge with a greater darkness pervading the empty streets of my neighbourhood, occasionally prodding the rotting skeletons of fruits and dogs with my desensitized boot, vaguely conscious of a song trickling out from some old, hard-to-locate, almost crumbling house, feeling my lips curve outwards, in half-remembrance of a past more romantic. So this is it, alternate spurts of disdain and sympathy, growing into a greater helplessness, the vestige of life exposing the void within. What am I, but a shadow within a shadow, a dot within an immeasurable ever-expanding chain, ambitiously and helplessly plotting my own freedom, devising my own unique identity, imagining an immortality all too mortal. So this is it. A shrug, a sigh and move on.

- Drugs? The great escape.
- Have played with it, but hey, I think sleep is better.