Her shoes clacked against the clay tiles, her hair swaying as she let her head lull. She ran her thumb over her fingers, letting it catch against the nails. She took long breaths in sync with the closing of her eyes. The darkness was comforting, the silence as stars peaked through the gridded glass ceiling. Her eyes traced against the tile lines. Her feet stopped. Her skin felt thick. Her throat felt coated in oil. Looking out at the empty glass halls she an odd feeling of freedom. It was exactly what she had always dreamed of, a place where nothing meant anything, but in the moment she still wasn't sure if she could really accept it. Even with no one else to judge her, she would judge herself, and she would judge wrong. The fresh air blew through the halls filling her lungs. She played the wind's motion in her ear like music, as if a distant choir of ghosts sang. She let the wind sooth her, letting her arms drop limp to her side and closing her eyes. She let herself collapse to the ground. Hitting the floor hurt, but strangely she began to laugh. It was fun. No one cared, and for a moment she didn’t either. It didn’t matter. The sheer absurdity of simply collapsing overwhelmed any pain she felt. Even she didn’t understand why she was laughing, it didn’t matter, it was just fun. The only thing around her being the wind and echoes of her laughing. She knew it would end, that at the end of time it would be nothing, but it didn’t matter. She laughed because she could, because if in a thousand years nothing existed she would still have laughed in this single moment. The universe was absurd, so why not. She existed, was that not reason enough? She knew she wouldn’t believe it later, but for now she could. She could accept it now, and maybe that was enough. She lay in silence for a moment. Her eyes snapped open, still and staring into the sky. It made her dizzy. She felt as if she could climb out of her body and drag herself slowly up into the night. She felt like she was crazy, perhaps in some small form she was. Living was crazy, and perhaps she had just joined it in its manic dance. Her mind scrambled with words and ideas, trying to assemble itself into something more than the sum of its parts. She found herself unable to separate life and death, to bleed out slowly would be as painful as it would be beautiful. She wished to die but not be dead. To live in the pain of dying for eternity seemed for a moment the most lovely thing. To live was to bleed and heal, and to live was to love something. She slowly pushed her fingers into her throat. As she gagged she lurched up from the floor. She stared down at her hands. She wanted to tear open her own ribcage. Viscera was life, and she wanted to live.
