Fifteen-second existentialist crisis

[tamago23]

I left my apartment and stepped outside and it was cold, but the more important thing was that there was this beeping, coming from who knows where but it seemed like the sky. And I stared up at the apartment buildings around me and suddenly everything shifted and there was this awareness that the man walking his pug across the street didn't know me and I didn't know him, and none of us ever really know each other, and we are all alone here. And a car could jump the curb right now and kill me, and the last thing I'd ever see would be the blinking old-style electric Christmas lights on the tree across the street, and they aren't even LEDs. But even if a car did jump the curb it wouldn't matter, because none of this means anything, there is nothing before us and nothing after us, and even if there were, it's time-limited because at some point Earth will go into the sun and everything we have recorded and known will be gone. And even if the human race were to escape at some point before the immolation of Earth, it still wouldn't matter because the Universe is expanding or contracting or somesuchthing and everything will end, and there is nothing else.

And then the beeping stopped, and the crisis passed, and I continued on to the store for bread, because toast with honey and margarine that lacks the bread is simply honey and margarine, and that just wouldn't suffice, because I really wanted toast with honey and margarine.