Everyone and everything melts in and out of clarity, like someone turned off the normal flux of reality- or switched life to one of the snowy channels. Even when someone you know interrupts your aimless journey through the faceless, diluted masses, you only recognize them as though some distant, recurring dream... Like a memory half-formed, which you respond to in a voice not your own.

When the auto-play button is switched on inside your head, your head...detached, yet anchored despite itself to the rest of you, inevitably, but drifting further away from your shore of consciousness than it's ever been... It's an orange buoy, a dot on a foggy horizon of slow; uneven waters... tussled in the lazy automatisms of reality's fuzzy wavelengths.
Everything's faded, pointless, yet ongoing, like a carnival ride of no passengers... and you just know that it should all stop, because it's not going anywhere. A running engine without a frame or purpose, a clock without the occurrence of time, such things just shouldn't be, and the staggering realization of it instead makes you stop, to contemplate it in its glorious uselessness.

But it doesn't bother you. Somehow, it's supposed to be that way, and you feel neither sadness nor confusion at the diffusion of logic surrounding you... And in fact, you feel nothing at all really, except what might be felt by a faulty bolt, whose bicycle has kept cycling on without it, after it has fallen to the ground. And like the bolt, though you've never felt so alone and useless, you don't feel sad, because at the same time, you've never felt so free.

Though now, you've no one who could possibly understand that, to share your sentiments with. You try to really revel in the taste of that unprecedented liberation from something you could not pinpoint in the first place, something you alone found between the waves of pointlessness and the constant, aimless, motions of life. Before that though, the realization that your own frequency is clear and untainted, above the heads of the swirling, noisy masses below you, is stupefying, because you finally see that without the bustle, you never could have escaped from it in the first place. And you see that really, being so different from everyone else is not only almost impossible a state to maintain, but it's also something that is dependent on the very same homogenous surroundings and actions you desired being free from. It defeats the purpose of having waded through the muddle to begin with, because now that you've attained your new view, it's lonely at the top.

It's as though your beautiful solitude is too bright, too outstanding and demanding... and you awaken, again aware of your need to be a sleepy automaton in order to survive. You suddenly crave the structured nonsense of life's uncertain paths, you crave the anonymity of the masses, and though indifferent they are. You return to being a blood cell in the greater entity of life, and you hope and pray that no one noticed how far your head had strayed, how pompously high it had floated overhead. You're ashamed of how rebellious you'd been, and the hive remains your only comfort. So you start smiling again, your android shell recommencing its perpetual motions of greeting and interaction, and it laughs... it laughs... even though inside, the silence is deafening again.

You're waiting to be born again; you're a fetus in your own mind. The walkman noises of life are what you hear, while the fuzzy, filtered mirage is the only thing your eyes can see, though for a split second, you had popped your head out to get a clearer view.

Though for those few brief moments, you had poked outside yourself and groped at life with something beyond your senses, it proved too loud, too bright... too foreign and indescribable. All the sensual languages that make up your life proved too weak to really grasp it, or to even hold on long enough to really see it.

So, you go back inside where it's safe, and continue along your muffled, censored path, strewn with other senseless marionettes such as yourself, and you laugh...in the deafening silence.