(untitled) by Lixuan

For as long as he* was self-conscient, he lived in darkness. He had nothing to his own, nor a consciousness of having needed something belonging exclusively to himself. He had no feelings of his own, nada, but he did not bemoan the lack, as not having it in the first place doubtless inured him to self-pity of dispossession.

What he did have, was a sense of shared awareness. It began one day with a vague feeling. Odd electric currents traveled through his ‘form’. He felt exhilarated, buzzed up.

Then as suddenly as it began, the buzz stopped. Something had changed. While he still lived in darkness, he now found himself sharing a common “awareness” – of tall looking columns, blue masses that looked sometimes shiny/ sometimes dark, and many others he had no way of describing – with someone, something.

Gradually he realized that there were others in this shared awareness. He felt a wave of exhilaration – though he was unable to speak of this nebulous feeling as such because he was never taught – a shared community, fwah!

As time passed, the awareness of some things faded and was replaced by others. Sometimes the shared awareness did not manifest itself in images; it came in full dolby sound surround, and other indecipherable formats.

One day, many years later, he felt the community of shared awareness fading. Had he the words to describe it, it would have been that he just had his first taste of loneliness. The “fades” just kept coming. Until one day, he lost the struggle to tap into the shared awareness and caved in to the desire to fade out like the others.

Away in another parallel universe, Tate plugged in his USB flash drive and was dismayed to see that the flash drive had finally died on him.

“Never works when you need them! Fortunately I had the presence of mind to do a backup recently”, he mutters as he walks to the dustbin and disposes of it.

*Real name: Byte-10115946789 of Toliba Flash drive 2GB S/N 123456789, suppressed for expediency purposes to “he” in the story.

~

"This story came to me at SITEX today, while I was trying to make my way out of the crowd after my sis had purchased her Toshiba laptop."