Re: the empty and the console
It was slow, this death. Agony. It came as wax of life and peeled, pearling teardrops over cylindrical edges, but it burnt down and it bled out and a husk was left, a husk dry and empty and unrecognizable as ever a man. But that didn't matter. Life had always been death. The man learned that lesson young, child on mother's bended knee, and he learned it from his own limitations, and he learned it then, again and again and again and again and again, theater of humanity broad and vast and so varied, yet so very much the same, a cycle, a tradition, and his friend couldn't be all that different.
His death, his undoing, square by perfect, impersonal square, some error in the code, it wasn't all that different. The burdened man thought about it as he cried. He cried and it was salt instead of iron, and when his friend joined him back on the sodden carpet, he came toward him, unthinking and open, nothing to filter out need, and he tried to put his arms around him, tried to press red-white t-shirt to the glitched out brown-black, and he cried.
"You don't know me," he echoed quietly, to himself, some sort of reminder, and his heart was four-walled and it wept as he did, tears of blood from ducts starting to blue at the edges. He tried, all of him - to say his friend's name, but nothing passed his lips. Empty. Like his throat cinched and he gagged on snot and mucus and he coughed into stained red hand. "It's all my fault."
And the remorse wracked him, curled him tight, muscles rigid, even the dangling one, and it squeezed out drops, drops, drops, nothing more.
"You didn't do it on purpose. It's what friends do," he tried to explain. He cast a bright gaze around the room, smearing copper beneath his nose as he tried to clean up tears. "Do you really think I'm alone? You're not. I'll always be here."