Existence is weird. True, she is fairly weird herself, she thought, but nowhere near as weird as existence. We find ourselves wandering around on the surface of a spherical rock, thinking beings living within fragile bodies of flesh that will eventually turn cold and stop moving. True, the better the inhabitant looks after the body, the longer it is likely to last, but none of them last forever, and after that, who knows what will happen to the conscious mind?

It was thus that she found herself unable to come to terms with what it means to exist, or with being human. She found it helped to pretend to be fictitious, and to that end would habitually refer to herself in the third person in the narratives she created in her mind.

But what of human nature, she thought. She watched them in the street outside, scurrying unquestioningly about their business, hanging around on street corners, sprinting after buses. The things other people cared about often fascinated her in a detached sense. It was like a zoologist observing a different species. The football fan gawping at the screen, enthralled by the suspense as to whether a man he had never met from a team linked to a city he had never visited would succeed in kicking a small spherical object into a net. The couple in the street, engaged in a loud argument over nothing that seemed consequential. The professor who dedicated his life to writing papers within a narrow field that he considered groundbreaking but only a few people ever read.

They create Gods in their own image and likeness, Gods of steel and stone, of retail and finance and progress, of learning and ambition. These they worship with their time, traipsing aimlessly around the shops on a Saturday, jealously hording their material belongings and the money, which, whilst in reality being merely a set of tokens to be exchanged for life’s luxuries and necessities, in their minds has been raised to its own godlike status. Eventually, there comes a time when, gazing into the shiny face of his own created God, one of them notices his own reflection, and seeing in his God his own imperfections, strikes it to the ground in anger before anyone else has a chance to notice, to see the ugly truth. And so, to pretend that nothing has happened, and to construct the next God, more sophisticated than the last. This time it will work, they tell themselves, for we have made progress. And so the cycle continues…

The postman delivers the letters to your door, and if you’re lucky you might have a parcel.

The spiderman delivers the spiders to your door, and if you’re lucky you might have a tarantula.

The dustman comes early in the morning to take away your waste.

The batman comes late at night to take away your bats.

…and thus the natural order is maintained, in some parallel universe not dissimilar to her own. She had learnt not to let the absurdity of existence worry her, but instead to embrace it and revel in its unpredictability.

“Do you ever find yourself observing the people around you as though they’re a different species?” she asked her companion in the café.

“As a writer, I often try,” he replied, “and I often strike up random conversations with them too, but then I sometimes end up falling for them by accident…”

She gazed out of the window, watching an unspectacular youth of indeterminate gender amble nonchalantly by.

She wondered whether he’d understood a single word she’d said.