My world is crashing down around me. This seems so blunt, but it’s true. I run down the street, and hear the rumble behind me as the devastation gets nearer and nearer. God why do you do this to me? Are you even there?
I run, stumbling in my heels. Hopping, yet still moving onwards, I take them off, dropping them as I run. I won’t need them anymore. Not where I’m going.



The machine bleeps steadily, as it has done for the past two years. The body in the bed is barely recognisable as the woman who once had so much life and energy.
Beside her sits the man who has visited every single day since the accident, tears in his eyes. He holds her hand, running his thumb across its back in a small gesture that speaks volumes.



I reach the park, where the fountains still spray. I run towards them, away from the devastation, hoping that I may yet get just one moment of the beautiful peace I’ve been enjoying these last two years.
Then, from nowhere, quiet. I stop running, and imagine for a second that I feel a hand upon mine. I look down, but there is nothing there. I am alone.



The man lifts the hand of the sleeping woman to his lips and brushes them against it. I single tear falls from his face. “Goodbye,” he whispers, his voice hoarse, cracking over the word.
Such a small word that is always so difficult to say. The nurse, understanding that it is time, turns of the machines one by one, and leaves the room.



There it is again. That feeling that someone is touching my hand. There, on the back of my hand is a single drop of water. I look at it, and something touches the back of my mind. A vague recollection, of a time before this world. A time when I lived, not in my own world, but in a place with others, whom I loved, and who loved me in return.
These memories seem to flash before my eyes, and I turn, round and round faster and faster, as if the movement could speed up the process, could let me see a lifetime’s worth of memories before the end.


Silence. That absence of sound. There is no whir of machines, only silence, punctuated by the sobs of a man old for his years.


My spinning becomes a dance. I dance elegantly through the life I once had, both joyful for the memories and sad for my loss. My tears flow as I realise what must truly be happening. A world is ending, but it is not my own, for mine lives on outside of this place, and will continue to do so long after I am gone. It’s all…


He stands slowly.
She is gone.
His world is…




over…