I stepped on some ash. I didn't know whose it was, and in the grand scheme of the universe, I suspected it didn't matter. I was a man of habits, and my habit was to forget—to forget the names of my enemies, the faces of my lovers, and the weight of my own sins, until I was nothing more than a hollow shell drifting through a city of ghosts. I didn't care about the smudge on my boot. Then a man appeared in my room. He didn't speak, didn't scream, didn't demand anything. He just stood there, a grey silhouette against the beige wallpaper, a reminder of the inevitable, a living shadow of the end that we all eventually meet, regardless of our status or our sins.

I left some things for him. A coin. A piece of stale bread. A cigarette. I did it because it felt like the right thing to do, or maybe because I was bored and the silence of the room had become too heavy to bear, a pressure that threatened to crush my ribs. I wanted to believe that there was a transaction, a way to pay off the debt of existence, a cosmic bargain that would let me sleep without dreaming of the things I had done. The man stopped appearing. I thought the problem was solved, that I had successfully negotiated my way out of a spiritual haunting, that I had bought another decade of oblivion with a few scraps of bread and a bit of misplaced kindness. I went back to my gin and my solitude, believing the world was once again simple.

One night, a group of people in white robes came for me. They didn't use force; they didn't shout. They just walked toward me, and I felt my weight disappearing, my memories leaking out of me like water from a cracked vase, the details of my life dissolving into a grey mist. I didn't fight. I looked at the grey sky and realized that the alley, the ash, the ghost, and the robes were all the same thing—just different masks for the same void, different names for the same silence. There is no "rescue" because there is nowhere to be rescued to. We are all just drifting toward the same void, a river of nothingness. I stepped into the white, and for the first time in my life, I felt nothing at all, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.

*** Objective Tensor Code: [OTMES_v2: M1=6.0, M4=7.0, N2=1.0, K1=0.9, I=1.0, R=0.0, theta=270]