He walked through the frigid city, glancing around at the neon signs and lifeless people bustling around him. Everyone seemed just as glad as he was to be there, which he felt rather angry about. He couldn’t understand it, but he knew the feeling so well- the feeling of being a disgruntled citizen- yet, the emotions he felt were out of reach, lost in a forgettable, yet significant time. He couldn’t fathom what people here would be upset about- they didn’t have to go through an everlasting existence, and every action they took was both meager and significant. It was beautiful. It may have been the only beautiful thing that existed in that moment.
He snapped out of his thoughts as a quick blur caught his eye. A small girl ran past him holding ice cream, with a joyful expression on her face. Maybe it was some sign from the universe, or God, if they were real. He decided to walk further and treat himself, despite the monotony of the world’s ice cream flavors blending on his tongue over the decades. Even if he ate one flavor at a time, between months, it happened to get revolting at some point, like someone threw every flavor into a blender, creating an unappetizing brown slop, overly saccharine and unsatisfying.
However, he had some hope- which took him by surprise. He hadn’t eaten ice cream in over five decades, after all. Not a single flavor, after he threw up from the last time he had a taste (it was chocolate flavored). It was the symptom of overindulgence, of tasting hundreds of things without much thought. This did mean he lacked ideas on what to order when he ended up at the small hole-in-a-wall establishment. It was a quaint shop with unique designs and a small, cozy interior. He had seen something like it at least a hundred times.
He thought of playing it safe and getting vanilla, before remembering the vanilla cake he had only a year ago. It was alright. It tasted like nothing, and felt like nothing. He looked at the pineapple sorbet on the menu, with a tantalizing, vibrant yellow tinge attracting his eye.
It would be better than nothing. He paid with the money he’d stolen a year ago, maybe the same time he’d had that vanilla cake. Or did the cake come first? It didn’t matter.
Even the inside of the ice cream shop looked grey, for all its pastels and cushions, due to the hazy evening light from the city outside. There was smog to thank for that- humanity’s ceaseless pollution tainting every corner of the world.
The art hanging on the walls was overly simplified, rather kitsch, and tasteless. He’d seen at least a thousand variations of it hanging in dessert shops around the world, posted online on endless, limitless social media feeds.
The sorbet was given to him by someone- he didn’t care to look at their face, or thank them. This had been done at least a million times before. A billion? To him, there wasn’t much of a difference between those numbers.
He took a small scoop of the sorbet into his mouth with no hesitation. It could almost be called eagerness on his part. He waited. A few seconds, or a few minutes, or an hour. The flavors lit up his senses; tangy, sour, sweet. It was perfect. It was reminiscent of the last good time he’d had pineapple; just two hundred years ago in Brazil, when he was still trying to search for something that he could hold onto and call his.
It may have been a day, it may have been a few seconds in the time the sensation passed. He was done with half the sorbet, and the warm lights and ocean breezes faded away to rot in the corner of his skull. Suddenly, the pineapple tasted sour. The sugar tasted plastic. The cup was flimsy, the spoon was small and inadequate. It was all nothing again.
He threw the rest of the sorbet away before heading out of the shop, the night breeze biting at his brain and his eyes and his hands. He turned the corner and kept walking before stopping and looking at the sky. Nothing. Light pollution.
If he headed to the woods, which he knew were far away, he could see the stars. He had memorized the path to get there. But every forest and every tree was coming together in his mind in a blur: the elms, the sequoias, the palms, the jacarandas, the banyans.
He continued to walk in the middle of the road in a daze, feeling annoyed when a driver stopped and honked at him in a panic. He lazily shifted to walk on the road side. They had no reason to care about him, his existence, or the nonexistent chance of his death.
