The air was putrid, filled with lies passed on between person to person. The parasites moved interweaving between home and work their eyes emptied and void of life, replaced with a false sense of purpose and an arrogant delusion of utopia waiting beyond the doors of their work. The sun beamed high as the last great beauty uncorrupted, and unyielding in its dangerous glow. The trees bend gently to the left as a small gust of wind shifted by them – it is the leaves that carry the whispers of those pretending to hide their secrets. I’m wearing black from head to toe, minus the red tie poorly tied, my eyes shifted from person to person, today was no different then any other in the past three years – I go unnoticed. Hoping my invisibility would be permanent I dreadfully make it to the blue vehicle, I can’t remember how or why it happened, but next I head her voice. “Ross…” I turn to face her, she gazed in my eyes, though she too was infected with the emptiness plaguing the world over, she reached her hand out to grab for mine each digit frigid to the touch and likewise painful. Her hair danced across her face from another zephyr zipping by, her lips curving into the slightest smile, microscopic if you hadn’t known her well enough, then almost as immediately they bent into a frown. My eyes left her face and to the ground tears saturated and burnt my skin emitting smoke where they trailed, I turned away and started to head back to the blue vehicle. It was then I heard the clicking sound of a gun’s hammer being cocked, I froze, not out of fear but voluntarily and closed my eyes knowing what was to come. She whispered audibly enough for me to hear clearly “I love you…” a message sent off in a bullet as the hammer released and the copper hit flesh. Gunshots are painless, like getting a piercing, it isn’t until you acknowledge you’ve been shot that it burns and you go into shock, my heart bled out at an accelerated pace and I fell mere seconds after impact. Not once did I open my eyes, they say near death, you relive your life, I saw darkness…and felt the last kiss ever awarded to me.