everyman

It seemed like he'd been stuck in a sort of temporal equilibrium for several hours now. On the desk in front of him, lay a page with an arguably shakey line riding down its length, splitting it into awkward halves. The halves were labelled 'White' and 'Black'. That was all that was in ink.

His hands fiddled around with the pen as he stared dreamily into the abyss of the sheet.

“How did I get here”, he wondered, “when did this begin?”. “Should I have known sooner?” “How could I have known?”

He took the nib to the right half of the page, in an attempt to condense his thoughts into a single word,

Decadence, he scribbled with little dexterity.

Insecurity, under it.

Inaction, below that.

As he struggled to distill his thoughts, his grip on the pen loosened and it slipped out of his hand and rolled towards the head of the sheet. It now masked the labels of the columns. A single drop of tear escaped the cusp of his eye lids and stained a small spot of the black ink that demarcated the two halves of the page. All it took was a reflexive blink to betray his emotions.

Perhaps, it was never anger. He felt weak. He sensed the thoroughly comforting blanket of self-pity wrap around him. It is biological self-defense, he rationalized to himself,

“It'll soon start feeling heavy. I only need it until it's no longer cold outside.”

He stretched his left arm out and reached for the glass, his eyes traced the three words he had just written. He brought it closer to his lips and realised that the glass was empty. He placed it by the page and debated internally for a bit before he chose to pour some brandy into it. It wasn't something he usually drank, but brandy was cheap and he suspected the smell of esters had some sort of uplifting biochemical effect on his mood. He pressed the back of his right hand to the steel body of the kettle to check if the water was still warm. It was. He took a small pinch of what looked like black pepper resting in a teaspoon on the table, and sprinkled it into the brandy, before topping the glass off with warm water. The warm glass felt nice in his hands.

He sipped on it slowly while trying to think of other things that made him feel nice. Cats? Sure, he did often personify them to a point where they could have simply started talking to him and it would not have surprised him. He appreciated the honesty in his interactions with cats. They came to him for food and occasionally some company but they were clear about their intentions and there was no scope for misunderstanding in that situation. If only more people were like cats.

He placed the glass back on the table and reached for his pen.

Kindness

He wrote under 'White'. “What evolutionary benefit did kindness provide?” “Perhaps, it was natural selection that resulted in reciprocal altruism being a natural trait in humans. In that case, how did a kind world end up as fucked up as it is today?” He looked over at the column on the right as if to find a reason. Whatever he saw seemed to moderately satisfy him. He abhorred dualities. Nothing and no one is all black or all white. Yet, here he was, attempting to categorise all of humanity's traits into two poles.

He deliberated for a bit before pressing the nib onto the paper. The ink flowed and left a scribble that read

Honesty

This one went against his inherent survival instinct. After having spent much of his youth in pursuit of absolute rationality, he had eventually inferred that cognitive dissonance was most definitely a socially-beneficial evolutionary feature.

“Honesty is accepting your limits. Its only concern is the truth. And, truth does not play well with biology. Reason is not natural, although, it is reason that has helped humans survive this long. And reason does not care about feelings, only about the truth, no matter how uncomfortable it makes one.”

He chose to believe he was an honest man. There must have been some dissonance at play in this explanation, however he preferred to remain ignorant. It mattered more to him if the people in his life were honest. He thought of those that were, as courageous and often wished to ask them for advice. He had never done so. He looked over to the other column and figured it was his narcissism—his need to appear perfect to mask any insecurites—that ensured he never made any such foolish attempts.

He felt liberated as these chinks escaped his body, and simultaneously safe, that they were still trapped within the blanket, hidden from the world.

He wasn't sure which column, if any, this next one should fall under. Against reason, he chose to follow his gut. He had only recently learned that the gut was a quasi-secondary brain and had therafter spent considerable time pondering over this fact. This had more or less convinced him that human bodies were merely vessels for bacteria.

“If so, this is a purely biochemical process that ensures, undoubtedly, the number one evolutionary goal—survival. Not of humans, but of the microcosm of bacteria in their guts” His rationality sometimes repulsed him. He knew what loneliness felt like. Heck, he had even managed to escape it at various moments in his past. He wasn't sure how he felt about it, though. He believed most people didn't really know either. The experience was quite like sailing in a flimsy canoe in the turbulent ocean. He much rather preferred it to have been like one of those ferries that could carry twenty cars with remarkable stability across the currents of a raging river. It did not seem unrealistic for some to be riding on that ferry. This thought brought him solace. He pressed the pen to the paper and traced

Love

He felt the blanket weigh down on his shoulders. It was time to put it away.

He tucked his tummy in, as his left hand reached for the handle of the drawer that just moments ago lay pressed against his stomach. He pulled on the drawer and slid his right hand in and fetched a pistol. He stuck the barrel in his mouth, with his index finger perfectly still on the trigger, his eyes scanning to check if the safety was off.

“I have never been more certain in my life”, he thought as he pulled the trigger, blowing up his skull into forty six pieces.