I turn on the shower, and strip off my wrinkled clothes, which included sweatpants, a black T-shirt with the emblem of a Spartan on it, and my underwear. I throw them into the empty laundry bin and poke my foot into the shower stall first, hesitantly. Perfect. The water feels nice hitting my skin, cleaning me of the dust that I had accumulated. I know I sound like an old lady, but I could even feel my joints and muscle star to loosen and relax. I scrubbed my skin until it turned red, and tore a brush through my hair, until it slicked straight down my back, right up to my hips.  I turn the squeaky knob and the water trickles to a stop. I step out of the shower, grabbing towels and wrapping it around my body. I step in front of the small bathroom mirror and look at my reflection.

            I look at my hips and thighs, which had been hidden from me by my sweatpants. I frown. They aren’t flabby or fat, but definitely not skinny. I was always average in aspects like that. I was the average in height and weight, and it looked as if things hadn’t changed much. My face was, as I expected, just the same, also. My eyes were still hazel. I like to think of them as rustic ruins, whatever that means. It just sounded right. The irises are a deep emerald green, fringed with a dark rim, and gold framing my pupil. I shook my hair in front of my face, looking even more like a ghost with my pale skin. I looked at myself a little longer, and decided I should change something, to start anew, as if I were someone completely different altogether.

            Scissors and garbage can ready, I stared intently at the mirror, two fingers dictating where I should direct my cuts. Snip. Snip. Snip. More looking into the mirror and combing. Snip. Snip. Snip. Checking proportions. Snip. I step back and look at the new me. I certainly did look different. Now I had bangs, slicing across my brow below my eyebrows, and my long tangled hair was cut to my shoulders. I smile at myself in the mirror, and slip on my pajamas. I turn off the light in my bathroom and maneuver towards my desk. I’d developed a habit of sleeping there also, just in case something came to me in a dream. The blank pages scattered across the wooden surface showed how little that had helped. I slumped into my chair, hearing it creak with years of use, throwing a blanket over me. I stuck my hands out from underneath and switched on the desk light. From the holes in the boards covering my windows, I could see the night sky. I imagined stars in them. I wonder what they looked like. My grandmother had described them as pinpricks of light scattered across the sky. Now, there was just a layer of smog.

            A moth fluttered by my face and landed on the lamp, scuttling around the outside before it finally found it could get closer to the light once it edged over the top. Buzz. It falls onto the desk, legs twitching. I brush it off with my hand. We are all like these moths. I take the pen and start writing.

Briiing! Briiiing! The alarm clock jolts me awake, and I switch it off, wiping the drool off of my chin. Darn. I had fallen asleep while still writing. I looked down and read over my late night work. I crumple the paper into a ball and attempt to shoot it into the trashcan. I miss. Why do I always end up killing my characters? It came from my subconscious, the crippled, dark part of me. It was the part of me that detested who I am, and what I was, but was also the part of me that struggled to keep a hold on life, clinging to the edge of the cliff with all its might. I was a human, a destructor of many things. Almost all animals were killed off by us, the forests were no longer, having been cut down, the sky colored the smoke emitted by us, the rivers running with our waste, and the oceans tainted by our touch. Instead, we have taken the metals out of the earth where they lay asleep, and fashioned them into conveniences. Robotic animals, void of emotion and real life, were created to do our bidding, covered in the furs of the real ones we had killed to adorn it. We created tools to create plants in the space where once mighty oak trees had stood.

            It sickened me, all of it. After my twentieth year on this earth, I had been introduced into record keeping. It payed well, and I accepted the job eagerly. Not only this, but it allowed me into the library of generations past, usually kept from the common sort. My job was simple. Repair the books of the great library. It doesn’t sound like much, and it wasn’t. I replaced bindings, recopied manuscripts, patched up holes bitten out by moths, and such. I used my free time to write books. I still wasn’t famous, and my books only sold just enough for me to feed myself before, but I was determined. Sometimes, after I would clean a book, I would hide them in my jacket and take them home with me, to read. Many days were spent underneath the desk lamp, flipping through pages, eyes flying across the pages.

            Everything the authors wrote about seemed alien to me. It couldn’t have been only a few hundred years, a few generation. Grand trees, towering above humans, indomitable, blue skies dotted with stars and clouds, carpets of grass, soft underneath your fingers and feet, and colorful oceans teaming with life. My world seemed duller, and the clanking of machinery, the jumbles of people, the buildings that rose high into the sky, and the robots becoming annoying to watch, to hear, to experience. I grew angry, but I could not express my anger. I locked myself up, content on living in my books, in the world before. My doctors who saw me once a year grew worried. They prescribed drugs to me, but they could not hide me from reality. My job was taken from me, and I lost even the books which had offered me solace. But I was human.

            There was and always will be that part of me that craved for attention, for someone to look at me, listen to me, speak to me. I wanted money. I wanted the new technologies that flashed on the advertisements left at my door. I wanted to live on the highest building, soaring above the others. I wanted fame, to be published, and to be known. I wanted all of that, but I resented it. I grew to become hateful of myself, and of the weakness of my flesh. It was easy. All I had to do was to blow on the small, flickering light that was my feeble life. But I couldn’t. I thought of the future. I told myself there was none. But what could killing myself do? Nothing. Could I change the world? No, it was impossible. Did I hope? Yes. Was it futile? Yes.