Youth.

It is but a fleeting moment in our lives. One that comes and goes with the wind.

One moment you're in your prime, living life freely without the slightest care in the world filled with innocent thoughts of love in your heart... then the next thing you know, you've reached adulthood and the world turns into a shit-stained dreary mess where something like love is no more than a disgusting lie.

Perhaps one day... you even find yourself in my shoes at the age of forty, the light in your eyes slowly fading to black, your head hanging down low like a puppet with its strings cut… slowly, but surely, losing consciousness, all the while staring at every drop that drips down to the ground from the knife plunged straight through your chest.

Your body, slowly loses its strength.

Your entire life, flashes before your eyes.

You try to understand how you arrived at this bizarre final destination.

Elementary school, you were bullied.

Middle school, you closed your heart off from the world and gradually gave up on trying.

High school, you avoided anything and everyone, you focused only on your grades and whatever little hobbies you may have had.

University, you wasted your time on bullshit promises of some sort of fancy high-paying job in the future.

Your final destination, your job, a prison to keep you shackled like an obediently trained dog on a leash. At such a place, you are allegedly part of society's workforce surrounded by those with their creepy masks, smiles painted on.

In the end, the expectation is for you to contribute back into the shitty clockwork system that turns children into fellow adults incapable of love, exactly what you yourself have become. You only know of work and nothing else as that is what society trained you to become.

At least, these were the sorts of scenes I saw before my eyes permanently closed and the world faded to black.

Right as the curtains closed upon the story of my life, I heard a quiet murmur close up to my right ear, "Haaaaaah. If you'd made different choices in life and learned of love… maybe you wouldn't have had to die all alone like this." I couldn't help but think of these words as being the seductive whispers of the devil.

As to whether or not those words had truly been said to me in my final moments… it may have been nothing more than a figment of my imagination.