Enrique's Writings

 In the pre-dawn hush, Bartholomew Smith Wells awoke to a silence that felt foreign and yet familiar. The last thing he remembered was drifting off at his desk cluttered with papers and the dim glow of his flickering light bulb. As he woke up, he felt guilty about falling sleep with unfinished thoughts—essays, manifestos, half-composed letters he was preparing that evening. He blinked at a ceiling made of strange patterns like an upside-down floor, and the air tasted faintly of ozone and wildflowers. He sat up, heart thumping, and tried to piece together his fragmented memory. The room was unfamiliar: shelves suspended with no visible wires, books with screens instead of pages, and a wall of frames that seemed to pulse gently, shifting with colors and pictures that appear in a random pattern. A gentle chime sounded, and one of the big frames on the wall blossomed into a scene he recognized, it was a photograph from his youth. Bartholomew remembered the original picture. It was a se...

 To Sammy loneliness was an everyday feeling as unbearable as it was it was familiar. Attending school was about the only thing he did that included other people. Playing videogames online was as lonely as the rest of his life. It was clear the other players were far away and had no interest in getting to know him, not that he wanted to get to know them as they were avatars in a virtual world. To believe that the other players looked like their avatars was as naïve as believing they cared who he was. His persona online, his avatar was a strong fighter, at one metre eighty, and ninety kilos of pure muscle, dark skin, green eyes, and curly black hair. In addition, his avatar had a beautiful girl as his sidekick. In real life Sammy was an overweight, clumsy boy too big for his age, with flat feet, bad eyesight and didn’t have a sidekick. The parrot residing in his room didn’t count. Although, there were times when Sammy thought that his bird was his only friend. Sammy was a very good ...