Day 5 or day 39 or day 42 or whatever day. Who cares. We kill our own times. Life is too long or too short to keep track of anything. Sooner than you realize, you go back to being the same shithead that you decided innumerable times to never be again.
It’s going to be a half-moon night with no stars dancing. There’s no quarantine in my line of work. I am meant to die in the field while talking to some brainless jerk. I am meant to eat cannon balls. ‘Go ahead. Eat it. Eat that as well. Eat all of that. Come on! Eat fast. It’s for the good of your own people. ‘ Well, you got to eat all of that even if you got no people of your own. Frankly, in my line of work, you got no life of your own. You live with a false sense of satisfaction. You have got the love of people, even their claps and kisses but what in the hell, where I am about to go, will I do of all the claps and kisses? What will I do with all of that if I cannot have, in these trying times, even simple things that I actually, really want like meat and beer? People. People. People. They hardly understand your side of things. Their lives, inside their little heads, is far too important than anything else. They drown in their own piss of emotions without even knowing when did the drowning begin. They cannot even watch themselves for just a second. Like simply watch. ‘What’s there to watch in oneself?’ they would say. Well, if nothing is there then why so much fuss.
I am watching the burnt rice from yesterday night, burnt at the bottom of the vessel. Things can go to hell in no time. A little here and there and it’s done. Your life is done. You are no more. You cease to exist here and go back to hell for some time. And in hell, it’s just your soul in the frying pan, smiling in pain all the time. As of now, I have put the burnt rice in the garbage bin, and I now wait to throw it out once its smell becomes unbearable.
The virus is spreading faster now. It has started liking the people here. It is everywhere now, breathing our air, sleeping on our sofas, taking a summer swim in our glasses of water, kissing our toilet seats, chewing our brain nerves, inhaling our farts, dying in our abdominal acid. It is fucking everywhere, and its message is clearer than that of any God.
— TOMIC RITER
Tomic Riter 