PROLOGUE
[A dimly lit poetry stage.]
Golden lights fall over velvet curtains.
The air hums with soft jazz, glasses clinking, camera flashes.
A famous poet, draped in an expensive black coat, adjusts the mic.
The audience quiets as he begins:
As I see through life,
I sit in a place between death and life,
Where life screams out of death.
The fire wrapping around the soul
Feels nostalgic, like when I was alive
Alive, like waves hitting the shores.
Those bridges with streetlights,
Vehicles passing underneath,
And people inside, chasing time,
Starving life itself.
To end up where?
Here? Lying in the coffin.
Cut to:
A small, half-lit room.
A television glows in the corner, broadcasting the same event live.
Empty bottles on the floor. Ink-stained papers scattered like corpses.
A man sits there: his face hopeless and pale as a yellow dried dahlia and numb as shadow.
He doesn’t blink.
The applause echoes through the corners of the room, crawling through his hollow apartment like a swarm of insects.
He whispers, almost mute:
“I wrote that.”
His voice cracks.
“I bled that. I gave my flesh to it. I gave my heart to it.”
The camera lingers on the TV as the host says,
"And this, ladies and gentlemen, was tonight’s masterpiece by our very own national treasure, Dr. Jonathan Jefrey."
The man picks up a page from the floor, half torn, creased, rough, the original copy,
his handwriting still trembling on it
and sets it on flame with the lighter he keeps for the cigarettes he never smokes.
As the paper burns, the crowd’s claps grow louder
until they sound like gunshots inside his skull. And the triggers were pressed so intentionally that the bullets went deeper than just his hollow mind.
Then comes the final whisper, calm and terrifying:
“What if I vanish, without a trace,
Would someone miss my face,
Or I'll get lost somewhere in this race..."
