It was like any Thursday morning. Harold walked down the street, not quite remembering how he’d gotten here now that he’d started paying attention, but not thinking much of it either. Such was the case with mornings. You have a routine, and after a while, you hardly notice yourself following it anymore.
Harold found honest joy in taking in the sights and sounds of the city. Glass and concrete shone orange in the morning rays of the sun as birds warbled from their phone-wire perches, their twittering mingling with the dull rumble of traffic. Cars and bikes found shade under the altogether-too-thin trees, whose leaves fluttered green against the sunrise.
Not a cloud in the sky today, which was fortunate since it let Harold see clearly into the gaping, dark hole on the horizon, just beyond the city limits.
That hole was his destination. He had business there today.
A pigeon landed in his path, bobbed its head as if to say hello, and flapped away. He gave it a nod and a wave in turn.
Suddenly, his phone buzzed in his jacket. He drove his hand into the pocket, forcing it through lint and dust and altogether too many folds of fabric. For a moment, his fingers touched plastic, but it was actually the flute he’d borrowed from his niece. He’d have to remember to return that.
Pushing past the plastic flute, he found a few buttons. Odd. He didn’t remember leaving those there. And beyond that, an old toy dinosaur from his childhood, its paint chipped, the plastic scuffed.
He pulled it all out and dropped it on the concrete, only to find much more besides. His phone had long since stopped buzzing by the time he’d excavated everything from the folds of his pockets, but by now he’d forgotten about it entirely. Harold was surrounded by piles of the memorabilia of his youth, piles which forced people on the sidewalk to scrape along brick walls or chance their way through traffic just to get past.
He picked up an old toy train, rounded plastic edges worn smooth, a pair of painted-on eyes peering up at him from the vague memories of his infancy. It was his first concrete memory, playing with that train. The first time he’d noticed himself existing, one might say. Everything before that was remembered only as stories told him by his parents.
He looked up again toward the hole on the horizon. Right. Enough of this reminiscing.
But he couldn’t rightly leave this mess here. He didn’t want to lose any of it, so he began cramming it all back into his pockets.
It proved a challenge. Pieces fell out as he shoved this or that toy or memory in, and some items—like that tricycle from when he was five—wouldn’t fit at all, no matter how much he pushed or shoved.
A man in blue ran by and snatched the old toy train from the pile, then darted down an alley.
“Hey!” cried Harold, stumbling over a skateboard as he tried giving chase. He soon righted himself, but had lost the man.
“Did you see where he went?” he asked a woman nearby.
She nodded, pointed, then bounded away, leaving Harold alone on the now-deserted street. The hole on the horizon had moved higher up in the sky by now. It did that.
He ran down the alley and around a corner, and saw the man in the bright blue shirt before he dashed around another bend. This time, Harold had him, and his heart raced as he followed him down many a roadway and alley, through a park, and up a grated steel ramp that wound up the side of a building before opening up onto a highway.
A few self-storage warehouses and restaurants dotted the far side, and behind them rose the snow-topped mountains. The highway itself wasn’t terribly busy, but busy enough to deter any attempts at crossing.
The man in blue was already on the other side, ducking into a burger joint. Harold had no choice but to leap the road in a single bound.
And so he would have if he hadn’t overshot it. All of a sudden, he was falling up toward the great, dark hole at the sky’s zenith, which opened to receive him like a vast, starry eye.
He remembered then that he had business there. But he wasn’t ready.
He wasn’t ready!
A rushing wind filled his ears as the world below twisted and warped away into a single black shard of reality nestled in a sea of glass. Memories, roads, and the man in blue were all absorbed into its obsidian depths, and Harold caught his breath as the sky bled away and drained into the EYE OF GOD up above with a blinding flash of light.
Through it all, a deep, rhythmic hum filled his ears and pulled him out of the eye that threatened to swallow him hole.
Birds sang in the trees outside Harold’s window, the slatted blinds letting in the first morning rays of sun. An alarm clock announced that it was 6:30 with a rhythmic buzz.
Harold caught his breath, enduring the alarm for a few seconds before fumbling out with his hand, which was caught in his bedsheets.
It was a full minute before he’d freed his hand, and another several long, grating moments before his palm found the snooze button.
Hardly a moment more passed before his fingers wrapped around some smooth plastic thing that sat next to the clock. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he looked at what he’d grabbed.
Painted-on plastic eyes gazed at him, peering as if from the vague memories of his childhood.
Peering at him from a time when he’d only just started paying attention to his being alive.
As with everyone, Harold couldn’t remember getting to that time in his life.
Just as he likely wouldn’t remember getting ready for work that day.
If he was lucky, he might notice himself walking to work later, hardly recalling the routine that had gotten him to that point.
All o this was lost on his groggy, dream-addled mind, however. With a groan, he got out of bed to start another day.
My apologies for doing this to you guys. You deserve better than an existential crisis of this caliber. However, if you somehow managed to derive some form of enjoyment from this piece of fiction, feel free to share it around. All proceeds from this post go toward helping people remember the point when they started existing. Really.