Always Boston

Hell found me. Somewhere amid preening my self-esteem and searching for the missing bits and pieces of my permanent dour expression, I felt the darkness begin bleeding into me.

It was a Monday, cold and dank, much like any other winter day in Boston. I was fishing for a grin, a handshake, something to clear the subjugation of my pathetic life. Of course, I knew it would take a miracle to really do me any good, but it's the illusion that drives us, isn't it? At any rate, the rain didn't start until midday. Swathes of people would be its prey, all running for doors and cursing God that they would have thought to carry an umbrella. Me? I sampled the musky scent of rain hours before it fell; I was waiting to watch them stumble – the Boston robots, the unaware, leading themselves in routine through the sheer conviction to be better than everyone else – to gleam the anger aroused by the hour-and-a-half hairdo, time spent only to be dealt something so devastating as three seconds of saturation. If I couldn't have it all, I was sure as hell going to enjoy watching them careen from their own heights.

It was amid my bought of uplifting scrutiny that I was struck with the realization of how low I had become. Hands in pockets, I resumed my mope along the catastrophe that is Boston, wondering at this new feeling. As a bit of a sarcastic joke I checked my pulse only to find it missing. Completely. My face was warm – life was in it. Surely my blood was propagating correctly; the failure must have originated out of human error. So once again I tested for that vital pulse, and once again it was not there. I felt my face break into a cold sweat, and somehow I understood it all.

To truly be human, to be alive one must have a soul, but I had only a hapless void. I had finally reached rock bottom, that place where only hell can comfort. Always an optimist, I proposed to get drunk and forget about it. Right about then a slender taper of skin sloughed off my right cheek to fall to the pavement in the sickliest fashion. In horror I grasped at my face to feel for a wound and came away with a handful of flesh. With a regrettably girlish scream I felt my legs lurch into motion, carrying me into an adjacent alleyway.

Groping for a solution, something to negate a wasted life of self-loathing, I fell back against a stinking garbage bin. Just when I thought my entire existence was as detestable as it could be, I finally found something truly worth fretting over.

That's when I woke up. Choking on ash and reeling from the most pronounced wave of heat I had ever encountered, I tried to regain my bearings. Then it all came flooding back.

Hell hadn't found me; it already had me – ball and chain. I had been living an exaggerated version of my life for what could only be the thousandth time, and as the tears became thick with ash I begged and pleaded into the flames that I would not have to live it again, but it was only a matter of time.