There was no way to say it. Reality had found a way to snake through little cracks in the floor. It bled through the once-varnished, now fading floorboards like a bottomless fuel truck mysteriously crammed into a bungalow. What should have been happening at a snail’s pace had blurred together into one long series of tedious events, stuck together by even more tedious sources of glue.

Life has become an abstract. Events were no longer being recorded and stored as concise memories, and not each day passed unceremoniously, pressing its warm body against the day before in hopes of re-igniting passion. It did not come. Either life had lost it’s lustre slowly and surely, or it had tragically happened one day in the past, but nobody discovered the crime scene or body and therefore, no one had noticed. It was more of a getting-sicker-by-the-day feeling than a sledgehammer to the skull.

There was a thick irony about it. Once, he marveled at my discovery that life was without an innate purpose or meaning. Now that his days seemed to lack a common goal or trajectory, days had felt more barren and empty than they had for a long while. There was always the spark though, even when it slept, at least it was there. The Changed Man groaned under the weight of It. Anguish. Limitless freedom, no purpose. It had moved from the boundless energy of limitless existence, to the unbearable weight of responsibility over the course of a few short years.

The Changed Man groaned. He tossed and turned. He spasmed. He actually spasmed. Nothing changed. Had he been wrong? They had said to never put all of your eggs in one basket, but then what was the point of it all? Open relationships were the territory of the confused, the pretenders or the people who should resign themselves to not being in a relationship to begin with, and he was mostly sure THAT was not him. He remembered letting go – making the Change – but he couldn’t recall exactly what caused it. Had it come for him in a moment of weakness? No, he had chosen it.

He looked over at the inbox with all of the messages piling up and decided to do nothing.