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I walk back down into my building, my feet moving on autopilot as I negotiate my way down stairs which suddenly seem so primitive. I have been living in a realm of high technology.
“OW!”
I grab my nose. I’ve just tried to walk through the wall due to force of habit, and it has ended painfully.
“Fucking hell,” I curse to myself, glad for an excuse to give voice to the misery and anger which has been welling in me over the last sixty seconds of pure abandonment. There’s some part of me that thinks he might change his mind and come back for me, perhaps with a grand gesture of romance.
But it doesn’t happen, and I am eventually forced to lower myself to the mechanical action of opening a door again like some kind of primate poking at its food with a stick. I never knew that just being human could feel like a humiliation in and of itself. No wonder Tyrant rid himself of me. I am such a ridiculous flesh creature constrained by things like solid matter.
My apartment isn’t locked. I left it in a hurry, not that anybody noticed. I wonder, for a brief moment, if I have been robbed in my absence.
“Oh my god, I have been robbed!” I gasp as I step into the small space which once felt like my own private domain. My possessions are strewn everywhere with no regard for logic or order. There’s so much stuff, laying about on top of other items, thrown carelessly by someone who had no regard for it.
It takes me far too long to realize that nothing is missing. Because I haven’t been robbed. This is just how I live.
Standing in the middle of a room whose walls I can touch with arms outstretched if I just lean a little one way, then the other, I feel an absolute disgust with myself.
Was my apartment really always this humiliatingly small? Was it always this messy? Did it always have this smell? It has been closed up for two weeks, though having the door partly ajar probably let some of the stench out.
I check my emails, which helps me orient myself to the present. According to my unread spam messages, I’ve been gone for two weeks to the day. That’s hardly any time at all. It’s not even a decent summer break.
I sit down on the couch, feeling every unpleasant part of it. The way the hard frame is pushing through the padding. The scratchiness of the parts where someone’s cat has used it as a scratching post. I find myself sensitive to everything, noticing everything. I hate it.
I've been changed, probably forever, by what I saw and experienced. I can’t go back to pretending that everything is fine here on Earth when I now know everything isn’t only not fine, it’s completely backwards. I’ve been living in the gutter all my life, and someone took me out among the stars — then dropped me right back into the gutter. I have reason to be bitter.
But I also have to face facts.
This is my home. This is my life.
There’s a tin of half-opened tuna on the counter, and that’s not helping the ambiance at all. I grab the trash can and throw it in, then start to throw out everything else, piece by piece until most of my apartment is in the trash and there’s a line of garbage bags out in the hall waiting to go down to the dumpster in the morning.
I look around at the place I have all but emptied, left with only my stained couch and my ratty rug and I wonder how I ever lived like this. Outwardly I might have been able to maintain the appearance of a functioning adult, but I was never anything better than a cavewoman with cable internet.
Now that I’ve cleaned, all I’ve really achieved is making myself feel dirty. Sweat sticks to me, and some kind of Earthly grease seems to be emanating from my pores. I don’t remember that happening on Tyrant’s ship.
Time to get cleaned up. A shower is still nice, right? Surely, even a trip to space can’t ruin the simple pleasure of hot water running all over my body. My spirits rise, almost imperceptibly as I step into the only other room in my living quarters — my bathroom.
“Oh god.”
My shower is disgusting. On Tyrant’s ship, I would stand inside the concept or suggestion of cleanliness and find myself cleansed. Here, there are curling hairs sticking out of the shower trap. The fact that they’re mine doesn’t make them any less gross.
The pipes are corroding, and the shower curtain has these little black dots all over it like the universe took a gross toothbrush and flicked it all over. The base of the shower has taken on a weird yellowish orange hue, some kind of moldy scum. Is it sentient? Probably as sentient as I am compared to Tyrant.
