’Everyone speaks of college as if it is a doorway into life, but in reality it is more like a corridor with fluorescent lights and no exits, a place where futures went to be packaged into careers, payments, exhaustion, and the kind of dreams that slowly learned to lower their voices.’
He dreaded it.
Not because he was stupid, hell no.
He could study when he had to and pass unbelievably and write the stupid essays filled with enough borrowed conviction to satisfy professors who had seen worse from people with richer parents.
He could survive college.
That was not the issue...
...and survival had never impressed him.
A cockroach could survive, a rat could survive and most adults survived, which explained the general smell of disappointment hovering over society.
He did not want to merely survive.
He wanted something to happen.
Something real; something so unbelievable, chaotic and purposeful enough to shake him awake from the soft decay his life had become.
For the past two years, his days had moved with insulting sameness: Work. Home. Phone. Sleep. Repeat. A part-time job he’d got in search for a purpose that paid just enough to make him feel temporarily responsible and permanently trapped; managers who spoke like authority had replaced their personality, customers who treated service workers like furniture with inconvenient breathing habits, late shifts, and showers taken more from habit than renewal.
At night he would come home exhausted, drop his bag somewhere in the dark, eat whatever required the least amount of effort, and collapse into bed with his phone glowing in his hand like a tiny, expensive portal into every weakness he refused to bury properly.
’OnlyFans. Porn. Endless scrolling.’
Women he would never touch smiled at him through a screen because modern loneliness had evolved into something that accepted card payments; messages he paid for that felt personal only because his brain was tired enough to be stupid, their nude photos and videos he paid for.
’Praises shaped by filters, angles, lighting, and a business model that understands horny men better than most men understand themselves.’
He hated it but he still paid for it.
It was not the lust really but the repetition, the dependency, the way he returned again and again to something he knew left him emptier afterward, that was harder to forgive.
He would spend money just to sit alone in the dark, chasing a few seconds of release that vanished almost immediately and left shame sitting beside him like it had paid rent.
Sometimes he would stare at the ceiling afterward, one hand still resting uselessly over his stomach, his phone dim beside him, the room smelling faintly of defeat; his body would feel drained, but not satisfied while his mind felt quieter, but not peaceful.
The urge would be gone, yet nothing noble had arrived to replace it.
He was simply emptier in a different direction.
That was the real cruelty of it.
Pleasure no longer saved him from anything and only postponed the moment when he had to look at himself again.
He did not drink nor he did not do drugs.
’A grand achievement, truly.’
Someone should build him a statue; he had avoided ruining his liver and snorting his money through his nose, so clearly he was a disciplined young man of rare moral power.
The committee for barely functional males could mail the award directly to his family mansion.
But he had found cleaner ways to rot.
Pleasure had stopped feeling like pleasure, music turned into background noise. Lust became routine and even his reflection felt less like a person and more like proof that the body could continue existing after the soul had started missing appointments.
He was not suicidal.
Heck, he was not here because he wanted to jump or some shit and decorate the pavement below with his pathetic existence, as dramatic as that would have been for the evening news and deeply inconvenient for the cleaning crew:
’Death does not tempt me.’
Death actually felt too final, too easy, too much like giving the world permission to forget him before he had even become anything worth remembering.
’No.’
He wanted to live.
He wanted life badly just not this thin imitation of it, not this routine of useless working he did not need, spending, scrolling, releasing, regretting, and sleeping like some machine that had learned no shame.
’I want a meaning, a hunger for something meaningful, a direction; I want to wake up and feel that the day belongs to me instead of feeling like I have been leased out to boredom in twelve-hour installments.’
He wanted to matter and stand for something in this huge world.
Below him, New York continued to glitter in its magnificent corruption, old money and new sin woven together beneath the black sky.
Somewhere down there, fortunes were being made and destroyed, lovers were betraying each other with warm mouths and cold hearts, men and women were lying in boardrooms and smiling over secrets.
Students were ruining their futures in expensive dorm rooms, rich people were pretending wealth had cured loneliness, while poor people were pretending exhaustion was character development.
The city had no moon, stars and no celestial blessing.
And still, it shone.
He lowered his gaze to his hands.
They were steady.
That annoyed him for some reason.
’A person having this kind of moment should have trembling hands, shouldn’t he?’
Some visible proof that the soul was cracking, some respectable physical symptom. But no. His body remained calm, healthy, and useless beneath the cold rooftop wind.
His life was not a tragedy.
His life was a waste.
He sat there above the glittering city, beneath the abandoned sky, and felt the truth settle inside him with quiet cruelty. No thunder, revelation, or voice from heaven and following retribution were needed to end him.
’I am just a young man on a rooftop, full of breath and blood and potential that has nowhere to go.’
At last, he exhaled.
The breath turned pale in the cold.
"So this is it?" he murmured.
The city did not answer and neither did the cold dark sky.
The absent moon, clearly protecting its peace from human nonsense, remained wisely unavailable.
And for a long while, he simply sat there, nameless beneath the empty heavens, watching a city that had learned how to shine without being loved.
****
A/N: Okay that was a nice chat, next time am here we’ll be embarking on our journey to those MILFs, yeah?