There are mornings when the universe hands you a task so clear, so vital, it echoes in your bones as you stir from sleep. This was that type of morning. I wasn’t privy to the celestial planning behind it all, but a profound sense of purpose filled me, like a helium balloon threatening to lift me off the bed.
Today, you see, was the day. No, not my day, that would be far too self-centered. This was a day so important, so monumental, that it deserved its place in history books, alongside wars and moon landings. Of course, I couldn’t actually name what it was, because that would ruin the grandness of it all. But the feeling, the knowledge… oh, it burned brighter than an overzealous toaster.
My first order of business was as simple as it was unavoidable: get dressed. Or, more specifically, slide into my ever-trusty trousers. The ones with the sensible pockets and the reassuring crease. They were my stalwart companions for days like this.
And that’s where things took a turn… let’s just say, not in the direction I anticipated.
It started as a subtle resistance, a hint of fabric having a bad attitude. My usual glide-and-zip routine turned into a minor wrestling match. This is when a sliver of panic snuck in, like a mosquito buzzing in your ear while you’re trying to defuse a bomb.
“Come now,” I whispered to the pants as I attempted to reason with the inanimate object. “Surely this is a misunderstanding.”
It wasn’t.
The specter of weight gain – the insidious enemy of waistlines everywhere – reared its ugly head. Had I, perhaps, overindulged in the past few days? Was there a hidden colony of rogue carbs waging war in my midsection?
“Nonsense,” I scoffed to the mirror, even as I gingerly poked at my stomach, “I am the very image of self-restraint!” The mirror, unimpressed, offered only the harsh reflection of an adult man attempting to suck in his gut while maintaining a semblance of dignity.
Determined to prove myself wrong, I brought out the heavy artillery: butter. This was no time for half-measures. If a modicum of lubrication could ease the way, I was all for it. This trouser situation called for a slippery slope – of the culinary variety.
The next few minutes were a blur of awkward contortions and increasingly questionable life choices. There was a halfhearted attempt at a headstand (why? I still have no idea) and an interpretive dance that would have made a mime blush. The end result was a sweaty, faintly butter-scented man with the offending trousers still twisted around his ankles.
From there, things went downhill with the efficiency of an Olympic bobsled. What followed was a whirlwind of ridiculous maneuvers that, in hindsight, were either choreographed by a drunken toddler or a fever dream I wasn’t yet aware of.
There were jumping jacks (why? I don’t know), an interpretive dance in my underwear, and an attempt to utilize my hairbrush as a glorified shoehorn. The mirror became my enemy, reflecting a disheveled figure with mismatched socks and the offending trousers twisted around my ankles, like a garish fashion statement gone terribly wrong.
Laughter bubbled up from some hysterical well of absurdity I never knew I possessed. The sheer idiocy of it all should have relieved the tension. But there it was, the incessant tick of the clock, counting down to… something big.
My desperation morphed into something resembling a poorly executed heist movie. I scoured the internet for solutions. “How to wear pants when they hate you with the fury of a thousand suns” was disappointingly absent from the search results. What I did find was a collection of oddball suggestions, ranging from using olive oil (messy) to prayers and affirmations (questionable effectiveness, given the circumstances).
The walls of my apartment felt like they were closing in, the air getting thick with the undeniable scent of failure. The pants weren’t just a sartorial nightmare; they’d become some kind of monstrous symbol of my inadequacy, a tangible representation of everything that could go wrong on this most important of days.
Without these trousers, without making it to whatever this momentous occasion was, how could I possibly live with myself? The idea of missing this… this thing I couldn’t even put a name to… filled me with a dread more chilling than an unexpected winter draft.
And perhaps that was the real absurdity of it all.
The clock wasn’t my enemy anymore; it was my executioner. Each tick a nail hammered into my coffin of sanity. The room closed in, sunlight curdling into something sickly and oppressive. I wasn’t just failing to put on pants, I was failing existence itself. The thought pulsed in my head, a drumbeat of doom.
Inspiration, desperation’s ugly stepchild, lit up the battlefield of my brain. I had to change myself, not the pants! A flurry of movement, a whirlwind of limbs and frantic hope – yoga poses warped into grotesque parodies, bones cracking with alarming insistence. The trousers watched, their inertness a silent accusation.
“Work with me!” I choked out, voice a ragged plea to the universe itself. “Don’t you see? We’re all doomed if I don’t get these on!” Logic, like a frightened bird, had long since abandoned the scene.
The DIY revelation hit me like a bolt from the heavens of absurdity. If they wouldn’t expand, I’d take them in! Fabric shears became my weapon, the safety pins clumsy grenades. My hands, slick with sweat and a tremor I couldn’t control, shredded and hacked at the unyielding material. The result wasn’t just fashion suicide, it was a testament to my unraveling.
But this wasn’t about looking good anymore. This was about survival. I had to fit. HAD TO. My vision tunneled, breath rattling in my chest. A belt, wound so tightly around my middle it felt like a steel trap, was my last desperate gambit. The pain was excruciating, a small price to pay for potential salvation. Or a way to pass out and delay the inevitable. Either way, hardly a victory.
Everything was off-kilter. The walls throbbed in time with my pulse, the shadows no longer passive observers. They writhed, slithered, whispered accusations of failure. Each tick of that blasted clock fell like a death sentence from the cosmic court of insanity that was now my mind.
There was no winning, only degrees of failure. My destruction was tied to these cursed pants. If I couldn’t be made to fit, then they would be unmade.
The scissors glinted wickedly. It was madness, pure and simple, but it was my madness. I slashed, I tore, the smell of burning cloth stinging my nose as I ignited a corner with the frantic flick of a lighter. This wasn’t about the garment anymore; it was about the enemy. My enemy.
When they lay in ruined heaps, I expected relief. Instead, my heart thudded against a wall of despair. The room was a prison, the ticking clock an iron maiden slowly closing around me. I’d tried, failed, and now the universe would reap the whirlwind of my incompetence.
The shreds of my sanity, those poor flickering lights I’d clung to with such desperation, were snuffed out. The room was a monster’s lair, the shadows its grasping limbs eager to tear away whatever was left of my mind. I was adrift in a storm of terror that had no name, no logic, only the bone-deep certainty of my own doom.
With a shaking hand, I reached for the ruined trousers. There was no comfort in their destruction, only an echo of my failure. They pulsed in my hands, an alien heartbeat against my trembling fingers, as if mocking my pathetic rebellion. I screamed, no longer at the inanimate cloth but at the yawning void of existence that gaped wide before me.
The horror wasn’t just in the room anymore; it was in me. The walls oozed a filth I couldn’t name, and the clock… oh, that infernal clock morphed into an abyssal eye, its unblinking gaze burning into my very soul. I was no longer the person of that morning, of any morning. I’d become a conduit for a terror older than the stars, a testament to how easily the human mind could shatter under the weight of a universe that cared nothing for its fragile creations.
The shadows clawed for purchase. They had voices now, a sibilant chorus whispering accusations, dragging out my every failure, my every fear. They were the universe’s indictment, proof that I’d always been unworthy, that my existence was a cosmic error.
My last surge of defiance was born of abject terror. One final, pathetic attempt to wear the pants, a desperate bid to appease whatever twisted cosmic force was orchestrating my destruction. I fell into the writhing material, and the darkness responded. It enveloped me, a suffocating cloak stitched with the icy promise of oblivion. There was no fabric now, only teeth and the stench of the eternal void.
I thrashed, a dying animal caught in a monstrous trap. The room warped, became an impossible geometry of nightmares. The shadows were monstrous appendages, dragging me kicking and screaming back into the abyss from whence I came.
And then… nothing.
The universe doesn’t care for dramatics, for poetic ends. My final surrender came not with a bang but the chilling silence of utter absence. The room pulsed around me, an echo chamber of my ruin, as I crumpled to my knees, then fell to the floor, a broken puppet abandoned by the cruel puppeteer of the cosmos.
Tears flowed, silent and useless. There was no world to save, no great destiny left unfulfilled. My catastrophe was the universe’s footnote, proof of how truly insignificant a thing I was. The shadows swallowed me, not in death, but in a fate far worse – a hollow existence on the fringes of madness.
As I curled into a fetal position, a pitiable creature cowering from the monsters birthed in my own mind, the last thing I heard was the steady ticking of the clock, counting down the seconds until I ceased to be at all.
High above Earth, in the impossible vastness where stars shimmered not with beauty but with cold indifference, there was a shift. It would go unnoticed by anyone left alive, but then again, alive was a concept rapidly losing any meaning. The Wurms of Azatoth stirred, gargantuan beings dreaming at the heart of the universe, waiting. Waiting…
For what should have been a simple sacrifice.
They focused their impossible gaze on the blue marble of a planet, seeking the ripple that meant appeasement, the surge of fear and blood magic that would keep them dormant for a few more precious cycles. It never came. Instead, they sensed something else. A discordant note in the endless thrum of cosmic energies.
The room was dark, a tomb of discarded dreams. In it, a pathetic figure lay sprawled amidst frayed cloth, the stench of hopelessness and a strange, bitter tang clinging to the air. The Wurms, creatures of ancient hunger and immeasurable scorn, narrowed their perception. This was their sacrifice? This creature, with its laughably simple task and its even more laughably tragic failure?
The fabric of reality itself began to groan, the universe collapsing in on itself as the cosmic beings decided to claim what should have been offered. There would be no more waiting.
In that desolate room, the human jerked awake at a sensation of unspeakable cold seeping into his bones. Reality had ceased to be trustworthy, the very floorboards groaning in protest as the weight of impossible awareness settled upon him. He looked up and saw them – monstrosities that defied shape, all teeth and churning voids, their combined gaze a blast of annihilating contempt.
The lead Wurm tilted its grotesque semblance of a head. A mere wisp of its true voice wormed into the human’s mind, a whisper that shattered his last, pitiful defenses. How… could you have failed?
There was no time for answers. As the human was devoured, body and soul, a single thought echoed in the void left behind: perhaps the real sacrifice was not life, but hope.
The universe buckled. Earth crumbled, its cities mere dust before the onslaught. The screams of billions winked out like dying fireflies. What humanity had built, what lives they had struggled for, what love they had dared to share was nothing more than a mote of dust caught in an unforgiving wind.
Then, there was only silence. The silence of the void, the emptiness that existed before creation and would yawn in its wake. The Wurms retreated back into the fabric of nothingness, their hunger sated for a time. And as they slept, the cold stars glinted, unknowing and uncaring of the epic tragedy that had played out in the brief blink of existence permitted to a little blue world and its hopelessly flawed inhabitants who couldn’t even put on a simple pair of pants.
Does God Exist? 