Drifting out into the intangible, where would my senses take me but to a frozen realm, deluded by my mind’s own illusion of beauty. A world unmoved in its silent tranquility, its greatest folly, fragile to even the slightest of touches..
     I wanted to call this place Paradise, but no paradise of mine could be so cruel to its inhabitants.
     For whatever reason they called it The Sepulcher, but no one here actually had the ability to speak its name. The people, pale and as delicate as eggshells, lingered only to march somewhere, beckoned forth by some dimly lit melody that only they could hear--that I was slowly becoming aware of as I found myself sucked in deeper.
     The place remained impervious despite this, but not only in a physical sense. Just so untouchable that if at any moment a tear from someone’s eye would fall, the painted cityscape would collapse and descend into a void ten times worse than darkness..
     A hell like no other that everyone here tried so desperately to avoid.
     Still, the people didn’t exactly move as I passed around them, but drifted instead like empty corn husks. Dragged by something, some invisible cord, every last one of them--but never completely reeled in.
     Drained and expressionless, their faces were but thin sheets of gray flesh. Traces of their real faces shifted beneath, all trying frantically to say something, but were forever lost to the death wish in their colorless eyes.
     So compelled was I to understand them, I found myself completely unable to will myself to look away. But I received no answers, for there were no answers that they alone could give.
     Even more odd was the fact that despite the silence, the general movement of time was murderously loud; even more distinctly absent was the notion of eternity. Everything about this place was more or less some whimsical illusion of humanity never quite coming into focus. As if trying to make out the world through a stranger’s eyes--wiping away a blur that never really left.
     Like rain, a thin dusting of ash always seemed to fall. There was a proverbial line of reality drawn out in chalk somewhere, but I could never quite place where it was because it just wasn’t meant to be found.
     Even the natural hum of taxi cabs and changing streetlights took on a completely different hue as I delved deeper.
     Everyone had something to do, but no one cared what they were doing. No one was going anywhere. It was all just some endless dance that only the living dead could appreciate, because here, nothing changed. Nothing mattered. A moment meant nothing because everyone here forgot how to live. Yet everything was spiraling out of control. It was amazing to see that the city retained its balance at all.
     A stained window could break, but no one would notice. A lamppost light could wane, but the woman walking her dog beneath it would keep on walking. A car alarm could sound off, but not a single head would turn.
     Everything about The Sepulcher was utterly alien, though somehow so familiar..
     Quite quickly, I vaguely had the sense that I knew where I was going.
     Beckoned forth by my own silent death tune, it should have came to me sooner that I would have met him here.
     My dreaming muse, and the only one that had a face. And not just a face, but a human face.
     He stood out amongst the rest simply because he was not moving like he should have been. Just.. staring listlessly at the sky as if every last detail of the heavens was something he had never marveled at before. Untouched, he was, but hardly spared from tasting the jade of the city.
     I opened my mouth to speak, but before the words came out I knew he wouldn’t hear me. The vines wrapped around his ankles had a familiar resemblance to the ones I knew so well.
     Instead, I found myself sitting beside him on the corner street bench. As if two strangers waiting for a bus that would never come, we sat in a silence that spoke volumes. Dusk seemed to stagnate then, and eventually, the calm of the darkness found a way to penetrate a piece of my soul as I came to an understanding about everything..
     It was then that he closed his eyes to lean on my shoulder, and I moved to touch the outline of his lips, that he inevitably disappeared.
     Taking his place, I gazed up at the sky with the same listless expression he had just moments ago. But it wasn’t really a sky at all as it was more like a combination of a mirror and a window. Wispy, but not so indiscernible that it was impossible to understand.

     There we all were. The entire city. Just.. sleeping in our beds..