The sky is red. and the city beneath it is like a giant gray slug. Everything tips back and falls onto a grayscale of notingness and everythingness. The city lurches, trying to throw me off, I teeter off course. With my face on the dirty ground, mouth tasting the filthy dirt, I wonder, wonder again, why do I subject myself to this rollercoaster of emotions?

I refused to see it. Dreaming is a sin. Foolishness, a felony. Dreams, fantasies and hopes, the cruelty of them. They set your heart alight, blazing with passion and burn you to cinders, ashes, till you're nothing. Nothing at all. I thread on rainbows and skyscrapers, breathing in the dizzy air of ecstasy and inspiration, oblivious to the coming end. But reality always has its last laugh. This voice inside my head is screaming, not whispering, but yelling. A fucking talentless waste of space. And I fall. I burn the skies and fall to the ground. Hoping to be dead when I hit the ground, with glassed-over eyes.

I run, trying to shake this slugginess off. Gaining momentum, my legs pumping with adrenaline. If I could outrun time, I could outrun the city, and get the hell out of here. When in actual fact, all I am doing is rummaging through the drawers trying to find a bottle of pills to knock back with a strong brew of coffee. This broken radio inside my head, playing the same old songs over and over again, my motions in sync with heartbreak and rhyme.

The terrible clarity of things send me reeling, retching all over the floor. I've got your smile upside down. All wrong, yet you still smile. There is nothing here. Nothing worth redemption. I'm everywhere, but here. This must be death, I think. The whitness of a soul, and the plagues of nothingness residing in me, eroding, corroding. Then this unbearable roaring in my ears. My eyes water, my hearts disintegrates, my throat shrieks, its sound lost in the reverberation of the monstrous cacophony of noise.

"Film me." you say. And everything stops. And I stop. The noise dissipates. Your voice crashes into my skull, right into my brain. I tremble and feel the pouring rain upon my cheeks. The roulette spins, fast, and the colors bleed through my eyes. Faster, faster, I spin, your smile falters, your voice twists, your eyes bleed, your hands breaks away, our eyes, our hands, your words, my dreams, everything, something, then suddenly, nothi-....

Darkness.

I wake up, and find the space beside my bed. A space full of emptiness, as it has always been.