CHAPTER VI

Slade began to think he would have been better off resting at home than the shit he found himself in at that moment.

Earlier that morning, he had tried to stay awake as he waited for power to be restored, so he could iron the clothes he would put on. Slade’s area had had no power supply for about two days, but that wasn’t a strange occurrence to him. It was pretty normal, and while two days of no power was bad enough, he had experienced much worse.

Slade supposed that if there was going to be power that day, it might as well be that morning. Here is where Slade differed from many people in Nonce: he held out hope, most times, that things would be better. He had a habit of seeing the future of his country through his humanity: He thought if few people could do some good-which he did from time to time-even when things were tough, others might just come to imbibe such acts of selflessness in time.

Nonce could supply power to its people every single day of the year. Nonce was exporting power supplies to some of its neighbouring countries while the power supply in its nation was abysmal. Slade was sometimes driven crazy by facts such as these. He asked questions a lot, and his favourite was "Why?" He never really got satisfactory answers regarding political actions in Nonce.

It was two twenty-seven in the morning, and Slade still hoped he would get to iron his clothes. He had no plans to put on wrinkled clothes out of the house that day; If someone could do just that and act like nothing was wrong, it would be Slade. But in the few days Slade had spent at home, having reflected on his two years living on campus, he decided that he would like to behave like other students in some respects; he wanted to dress neatly, go out more, and meet new people…

Slade sat up straight up at the edge of his bed. He felt like lying on the bed, but he didn’t trust himself enough not to sleep once he did that. Sleep, he thought, was his enemy at that time.

Slade suddenly became intrigued by how something so beneficial as sleep could be undesirable at a particular time or forever. He thought that broken relationships and how the individuals who were once lovers abhorred each other depending on how it ended were examples.

“In a relationship,” he remembered his mum saying, “time reveals a multitude of sins.”

”Time,” Slade said to himself. He remembered that he was about thirteen years old when his mum dug a hole in front of their house to plant the a mango seed. She let him put the seed in the hole while covering it how she saw fit. Over the next few days, Slade was happy to water the hole every morning, and evening-he did miss sometimes-while he waited impatiently for the seed to germinate. “It will take some time,” his mum would say whenever she saw him examine the hole, and she was right. For Slade, three weeks was a long time, but he remembered being very happy when he saw a leaf emerge from the hole.

He felt an impulse to go outside to see the tree, but he didn’t have to; it was a tree he could describe perfectly well to someone who had never seen it. The tree was now bigger than any human-even giants-he could ever imagine, and with an average lifespan of over one hundred years, it would outlive many humans alive at that time.

Slade quickly realised that the thought of ageing and dying wasn’t peculiar to him. It was something almost every human on the planet was obsessed about.

As a kid, he always dreamt about growing older. Grown-ups around him could do whatever they wanted: go out at night, drive, buy whatever they wanted, drink, smoke… with no one asking-most times-why they did what they did. As he grew older, he found that many of his suppositions were untrue, but it didn’t matter; he wanted that freedom. He couldn't even stay out of the house for two hours without his parents complaining. Growing up assures freedom, better than I have now; at the very least, he had always thought to himself. And even though he learned that life wasn’t as simple as that, he still wanted to control all his decisions even though he knew he would also have to bear their consequences.

But something baffled him when he began to read books, in addition to the thought process of older people around him: they wanted to become young once more! This time, he was able to find out why. The answer? They didn’t want to die. But it didn’t make sense to him, just like many answers Slade had come across in his nineteen years living career on the planet. He couldn't understand why people would want to continue to suffer and feel pain forever! Maybe I’m missing something; he thought, something that when I possess, I wouldn’t want to lose. He thought that could only be the reason behind people’s irrational fear of death. Or maybe they were just scared of “What happens next if I die?”

“More like when they die,” he said to himself, smiling.

Homo Sapiens had many theories about what would happen or not happen after death.

Slade thought that although uncertainty was something humans could live with every day, it made their daily lives enjoyable as there's always something to look forward to but agreed it might become a bit much to cope with when the thought of something as final-or not-as death was involved.

He also found it ironic that for a species known as “wise one”-the literal translation of Homo Sapiens-there was a whole lot they did not know and understand.

He moved to the only table in his room to get a battery-powered torch; he then reached for his bag on the bed, from which he brought out a pen and book on which he wrote:

Lead to gold, immortality, they were things Alchemists would have given anything to discover, and Slade wondered if they had prioritised one over the other. Which was more important to them, Slade thought, if they could have gotten only one of wealth or immortality?

Slade thought nothing could be more boring and life-sucking than repetition, which was the only thing he thought immortality had to offer.

He had read a line from a book which he seemed to agree with totally: What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Life had never been better, Slade thought, and it had never been worse. Life was shit and will remain that way until life ceases to exist if that ever happens.

“The miserable lot of humans,” Slade said to himself. How do I accept this as truth but still think I can turn things around for people around me? Deluded?

Slade decided it was best to go to sleep so he would not wake up too late for his journey that morning. Looking at the poem again, he felt a little sad but did not know why. He closed the book and put it in his bag, together with his pen and his torch.

He climbed onto his bed, dusted his feet, and unfolded a piece of cloth beside his pillow, which he used to cover himself. His eyes were open as he laid his back on his bed and hoped for power to be restored before he slept. It never came.