He lay on the grass watching the invisible sky, comfortable, not feeling much of anything. There he was, a conscious human, aware of the fact that his consciousness was pondering its own existence, aware of the beauty surrounding him, although it didn’t touch him like he thought maybe it should. It was just there, as it always had been, as it always would be. He had no effect upon it, so he thought. He was born, he would live, he would die, just as the billions before and after him have and would. It was rare that an individual would have any kind of effect on the world, the universe, and when he did, well…what was the point?
Neither sad nor happy nor anywhere in between, he felt nothing, and felt nothing about feeling nothing. He lay there in thought, hands interlocked behind his head, feet crossed slightly below his body in perhaps the most comfortable and pleasurable position possible as a human. But it wasn’t all that comfortable or pleasurable. He wondered if it were possible for a dog to be more comfortable than he was in that moment, as it lay curled up in a crescent, face resting over the side of one paw, warm but not hot, a coat of soft fur covering its entire body.
He never finished the thought – a mosquito landed on his nose, and without moving his hands he blew a quick breath upward to remove the bug, which simply flew to his forearm. Uncrossing his hands and raising his forearm to his eyes, he watched with curiosity as the mosquito pierced his skin and began to feast on his blood, swelling up and reddening under the setting sun. “Enjoy your last meal fucker,” he muttered in a humorously menacing, grainy voice which hadn’t been used for hours.
Just as he was about to bring down his hand upon the little insect, he had a seemingly random change of heart and let it fly away. He wondered if the little insect felt anything resembling the sleepy contentment of humans after a full meal. He wondered if maybe the mosquito indulged a bit too much and was uncomfortably full, yet had no means, such as loosening one’s belt a notch, by which to comfort itself. He never finished the thought, instead drifting into the quite enjoyable variety of light, dreamy sleep in which one’s mind wanders wildly, unrestrained by any laws of society, physics, even logic.
In the dream, the mosquito he let live went on to procreate countless times, one of its descendants a thousand years in the future landing on a fat, sweaty, snoring man. The man was planning an atrocity the likes and magnitude of which had never been perpetrated in Earth’s history. But that mosquito, which existed despite enormous odds, infected the sleeping tyrant with malaria, killing him, and saving millions of innocent people from gruesome deaths.
Maybe that’s the point, though invisible to us. At least in this world.