An Expression of the Meaning of Life

Simon Lane walks in to his high school building with a blank face. He walks through the dim hallways ignoring the crowd of emotions and thoughts surrounding him. An acquaintance of his calls his name, trying to get his attention and start a conversation about the mundane and meaningless, but Simon is too busy thinking about nothing. Not that he is literally thinking about nothing, in fact, he is essentially thinking about everything.
         About how nothing and everything are the same thing.
         About how nothing he has done or will do matters in the slightest.
         He wanders up to his locker and begins to go through the motions of preparing himself for the last few hours of public education that he will have to endure. Last day of school, senior year. Around him, swarms of fellow students buzz about arbitrarily important and exciting things. Just average American teenagers with minds clouded by average American thoughts, all worked diligently through school to get in to a good college, get a good job, and ultimately die.
         Simon does not want to get in to a good college. Simon does not want to work until death. However, Simon also does not want to be uneducated, unemployed, or any other alternative for that matter. Just cresting adulthood, beginning what some people call “freedom,” Simon Lane is tired of this unavoidable shared experience that is life.
         Simon is not a depressed, self-loathing person. He just doesn’t understand the point of existence. He knows that he is just one insignificant amalgamation of cells that gained the ability to think and feel, trapped on a pale blue dot in an obscure corner of the infinite and ever expanding sea of the universe with billions of other self-aware amalgamations of cells. He had experimented with the idea that the point of human existence is to simply be happy and make the most out of his short time of being conscious. He tried this theory, but he just didn’t understand the point of being happy.
         Simon has just about as exciting of a life that someone of his age could have. He has sex, he gets in to fights, he does drugs, and he commits crimes. Still, none of these controversial activities are able to give Simon any façade of meaningfulness to reality. Simon shuts his locker and starts moving through the mass of human life clogging the arteries that are the hallways of the school. He notices the corner of a ten dollar bill poking its head out of the back pocket of one of his female classmates. He “accidentally” bumps into her, turning around and apologizing, all while swiftly removing the currency from its nest, giving it a new home in his own pocket. Simon does this sort of thing all the time. Even though he has no interest for monetary or material gain, he does it because he can. He does not care about anyone. Any of these people that inhabit this building of state funded indoctrination could die today, and he would have no feelings about it either way. He often shoplifts, breaks into houses, or mugs people as part of his futile quest to find meaning in anything. He figures that since the rest of modern society is so greedy and focused on money and consumerism, he might as well be also. Still, he just doesn’t understand money.
         Simon steps through the door to his homeroom. He sits down at his desk and begins to think of one last reason for existence, reproduction and the passing on of his genes. He quickly dismisses this, knowing that even though that is the biological purpose for all life, he would not want to bring a child formed of his own cells into this rapidly failing world, only to most likely be faced with the same problems about the pointlessness of existence that he is currently being faced with.
         Simon sits back in his chair and begins to doodle as the bell rings and the people he doesn’t care about fill the seats around him. They chatter about things he doesn’t care about before the teacher he doesn’t care about shuts them up and starts talking about more things that he doesn’t care about.
         He is tired of not caring.
         He is tired of life.
         Simon Lane loosens his belt and pulls out the compact pistol that was concealed under his clothes, strapped to his stomach. He cocks it.