Chapter 1: Aimless Wandering

The silence as I left my home was nothing but eerie. It was mid morning, but it was quieter than even the quietest midnight. The silence was no less unnerving even after several days of it.

I can’t remember exactly when I started regularly walking the streets in search of some sort of stimulation, any sort of stimulation. Recently time had become even more blurred and abstract than normal, even my normal. Thinking back, I don’t even think I was aware of when I started wandering, but it was the sweat trickling down my brow last November that finally brought me to awareness.

Depression.

Sorry, preempting the question before you can ask how I could have no awareness of my actions. 

At least that’s what I think it is, as far as I can remember I’ve always felt off, out of sync with the world. My experience of emotions muted and struggling form real social connections beyond going with the flow of those around me. I’m a follower. Looking back, I’ve always been at my best when I’m just going with the flow, following what others around me are doing. 

Like I’m on autopilot.

I don’t remember much and I am sure others will disagree, but things were best during high school. Timetables to follow, routines to fall into, crowds to follow and blend into. Go to my after school fast food job and then return to my small flat at night. 

Things just made sense and there wasn’t any need to do more than just follow the script in front of me. I could do it sleepwalking.

My memories of university are a bit clearer, things weren’t quite as straightforward but they were still pretty good. Balancing part time jobs, going to classes, studying; you know what it is like. Still there were new challenges that forced me out of autopilot like having to choose what classes I was taking, organising the routine, struggling through interacting one on one for paired assignments.

You can probably guess that I didn’t, maybe couldn’t, form attachments. Didn’t make friends.

Anyway, university… 

It was also where I discovered how to feel actually alive. University events and parties, protests, clubbing. Crowds of people and their surging emotions, sometimes assisted by alcohol and drugs. Being among them and riding the waves of their emotional highs, resonating with that energy in order to feel it. 

Once I had finished university, I was left with just my part time jobs and a whole lot of time on my hands plus a huge void to fill. When I was in my apartment, I was just quietly waiting for my next shift, eating or sleeping. Sometimes just sitting for hours waiting. Feeling nothing.

It wasn’t long before it drew me out again seeking stimulation. Concerts, clubs, bars, sporting events… Immersing myself in the oceans of heightened emotions. 

It wasn’t enough.

I found myself acting on my own imperitus to find new sources of it. 

Forcing the emotional highs required to pierce through the anhedonia, the emotional void. Excitement, joy, rage, even despair. Learning boxing led to street and back alley brawling, feeding off the excitement of the audience, the anger of my opponents. Clubs and pubs lead to substances. Leaping off cliffs into water to force my heart to race. 

Chasing experiences.

Then the pandemic and lockdowns hit. The world as we know it shuddered to a stop and my ability to access it disappeared. My part time jobs disappeared. My routine contracted to waking, eating, staring at screens, and sleeping. The emotional dullness returned and without crowds to follow, emotional highs to seek, or experiences to chase; the autopilot returned.

All sense of time and then self faded.

Until sweat running from my brow into my eyes woke me up again.

I think I’d been seeking, searching out the stimulation that I was missing. Trying to find any trace of it outside my tiny apartment. Anyway the walks became a conscious activity, taking new routes daily as I eked out whatever sensory and emotional stimulation I could to stay awake.

This brings me to the pause.

If the pandemic and lockdowns were bad, the pause was worse. Waking up to it on the first day was, how do I put it…  Right. Waking up, it was strange.

Waking up, that day was like any other or at least it almost seemed like it until I went out my front door. Seemed like it. Already from the moment I had woken up, there was a part of me that had realised it was too silent. And it had the hairs on the back of my neck standing upright.

But the rest of me didn’t really catch on till I encountered the first ‘statue’. 

One of my neighbours, unmoving, frozen in place at their apartment door, key in the lock half turned as she was leaving.

There weren't actually that many statues as I continued outside, the pause must have hit in the early hours of the morning when most of the late shifts were finally in bed and only the earliest of the early shifters were heading out. Well, human statues anyways…

Frozen birds in trees, petrified cats caught slinking and wandering the streets, rodents halted mid scurry. A few carbound early commuters, a garbage truck with an upturned bin in its claw, garbage hanging suspended in midair, delivery trucks and vans stopped in the middle of their deliveries.

I ended up walking a lot further and longer that day and even further and longer again on both the second and third days. I didn’t return to my apartment last night until long after sundown. Enough to know the pause had consumed the entire town if not the whole world.

Well maybe not the whole world, the internet might have been down, but turning on my tv demonstrated we were still getting signals from the outside world. Tuning into the national broadcaster revealed that the signals were live and that the nearest city and the rest of the country were not paused. 

No word on the pause though, despite the fact something like this shouldn’t have gone unnoticed, it had. It was like I was suddenly living in the town the world forgot.

Alone.

Well alone until I heard voices…

It’s kinda funny. I never used to think this much to myself.