Book: 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world. Page 2

Hope is a dangerous reagent that can provoke a chain reaction in the human soul.

Her life closed like a door, and now she was eager to find a new door and open it. Anyone who hasn't traveled the world is blind, she thought.

She kept thinking about it until one day she realized how terrible the question was. Wondering, "Why me?" she seemed to be asking, "Why not someone else?" and for that question she hated herself.

Human memory is reminiscent of a nighttime buffoon who drank too much: no matter how hard you try, it cannot follow in a straight line. She chatters in a chaotic maze, and often she moves in dizzying zigzags, completely immune to the mind and at risk of completely evaporating.

Cry darling. And never be ashamed of your tears. Cry - and no one will doubt that you are alive.

When she was still alive, Tequila Leila was always a little surprised and even upset if people talked about the end of the world with great pleasure and obsession. It would seem how a person in their right mind can believe so much in these crazy scenarios: asteroids, meteorites and comets, plunging the planet into chaos? According to Leila, the apocalypse is far from the worst. The likelihood of an instant and complete destruction of civilization is not at all as frightening as the simple realization that the death of an individual person has no effect on the world around him and life will go on as usual - with us from without us. But this, as it always seemed to Leila, is really creepy.

High overhead in the sky, the silver of yesterday's moon still sparkled, clear and unattainable, like a reflection of some happy memory. She is still a part of this world, and life still glimmers in her, so how could she not be? How could she walk away like a dream faded with the first ray of daylight? After all, a few hours ago she sang, smoked, cursed and thought ... and even now she is still thinking. It is amazing that the brain is still working at full strength, although no one knows how long it will last. How she would like to return and announce to everyone that the dead do not die immediately, that in fact they are capable of thinking about many things, including their own death! People would be scared to know about this, Leila decided. She herself would surely be scared if she were alive. But it seemed to her that it was very important to tell others about it.