He stared past his turntables and over the rail of a wooden porch constructed over an artificial stream that was surrounded by artificial plants. Dim lighting smeared the artificial rock walls with red, green and blue. He glanced over crowds of people dancing to nothing, their heads bobbing up and down, headphones as glowing crowns bringing a halo of red, green, or blue. His eyes dimmed. The world seemed too quiet. Even as his music blared into one headphoned ear as he manipulated that sound as it dove through his machines, through the aether and into the ears of every person out in the garden below him, in crowds carved apart by artificial streams and artificial plants. Each person would phase in and out of halo, red, green, blue. Colors flowing in and out of the dark garden he stood above on his wooden porch that had no house to attach to. He stared out into the crowd, and felt something missing. A lacking. Not a loss, but a gap in which something needed to be. A gap that was filled with only darkness. That gap didn’t exist where he was, but he knew where it could be. Through time and space, he could feel that gap opening up, yawning a cold exit from his world, allowing him to dive through into the icy cold of the night sky, of the stars that pinprick his skin with searing needle precision. He swats them away with one arm, swimming forward with the other, bearing the burning stabs of hungry stars for a loss that he could no longer bear.












