The Hourglass
He opened his sleepy eyes.
It was dark already. He must have slept the entire day again. He tried to stand up, it took more effort than he remembered. He blanked out thinking.
He opened his sleepy eyes. He was on the road. The faint lights were illuminating the streets. There was some kind of noise. He tried to listen, but stopped; it took more effort than he remembered it needed.
He stared at one familiar building. People were swarming the place. Maybe it was the music. Maybe it was the stench. Maybe it was the alcohol. He stared at them, each was holding in their hand a glass. It looked like a disproportionate hourglass. The cone was smaller on the top side, while a more voluminous one hanged at its opposite. These were the standard glasses people used to drink. He closed his eyes again. It seemed strange for him that they would use the upper surface, which was smaller. The much larger surface would be hanging out low. People seemed to like it that way. Of course they used to complain a lot about their problems. How they wished people would design better containers. How the amount of liquid that fits there was small. People liked to have meaningless problems around. It was a good distraction. They figured a good fog would cloak them. Or perhaps some liquid could.
Instead they were ravenous, problems had to be solved, people had to know how to discuss these problems. People argued whether or not they should simply switch out the cones, larger prisms or larger cubes might look more trendy, and yield more surface, they thought. They even were so controversial on the matter, that they even created schools of thought: the convergent and the divergent. They liked naming things like that, polar opposites seemed nice. Left and right was cool, only if you don’t remember you can pretty much go anywhere, up and down, or even forward and backwards. He remembered uttering once to someone about just flipping it to use the bottom half. It was about three times the size. He remembered the reaction. People laughed. Who could conceive such a silly thing to be done. Glasses had to have their larger cones pointing to the ground. It has always been this way. Also someone who knows not of convergence nor divergence probably does not know much.
The familiar cold breeze forced his eyes to lazily open again.
He was on a building’s roof. He couldn’t remember which building it was. It took significant effort to remember. He slowly became conscious of the weight of his body up until he and the wind could not drag his corpse. He noticed a strange pole next to him. It was pointing upwards, with its icy metal claws. With a little effort he looked up, the sky was bright. Little stars seem to have gathered around.
He took a deep breath in. He smiled at the stars. They did not smile back.
His smile broadened to a grin.
He stood up as if to reach for the stars.
He laughed. A wicked laugh. He let his body fall.
The pole pierced his body. It felt a familiar cold. He felt a slight pain, relatively.
He laughed again.
He then burst out in laughter. Until it felt too tiring to laugh. It took more effort than he expected.
He closed his eyes again.