If Nothing Else, I Will Have at Least Written This Sentence: Sentences from an Unwritten Novel

For him, the digital image became more believable than the actual event, and hovered in the gray, folded layers of his mind like an oversaturated, iridescent hummingbird.

She used to feel like she inhabited her life; now, she felt like a visitor.

His daily life-experience was best described by a persistent thought which tried to filter its way through his head as he walked along Michigan Avenue, how each car in this morning's rush hour seemed to flow directly into him and disappear within the dark, echoing forests of his past instead of harmlessly passing by him, as if he were a portal from which nothing ever returned, though the image of every object hovered before his face, in his wide line of vision, as if on the event horizon of a massive black hole, making it difficult for him to see what was coming and where he was going.

After half a century of living, he wasn't sure if the human condition was something to be embraced or transcended.

The light on the dirty water running back and forth in the blue grooves of the rubberized flooring on the CATA bus caught her eye--made her feel insignificant and omnipotent at the same time.

Given time, he grew to realize life had become awkward: little more than a catalog of events that would never happen, a litany of items he would never possess.

He was part of a loose, widespread cult known as America which subscribed to the belief that the investment of a portion of each paycheck for the purchase of small electronic devices could balance the ills brought on by social media, bad genes or otherwise by providing a variety of platforms.

These days they spent many long nights listening to impressively engineered playlists with expensive headphones and occasionally looked over at all sorts of people talking on the TV, their wooden mouths moving like those of nutcrackers and puppets, all while scrolling across an internet as burned out and lifeless as a planet more ancient than the one on which they so inhospitably lived.