Naush’s knees finally gave out. He crumbled onto the ground, shattered like a dusty porcelain doll accidentally swept off the shelf.

As he feebly wheezed through his congested nose, a teeny tiny speck of dust entered his blurry sight. It did a little twirl in the air, as if to say ‘Hello’ with a wave, and then landed somewhere between the grains of the wooden tiles a few inches away. Naush tried to locate exactly where the speck was so he could pick it up later; however, every line of the tiles seemed to be swimming in his teary eyes, and it was surprisingly hard to focus when he was listlessly horizontal on the ground.

Naush couldn’t bother to raise his head; he couldn’t even rub his eyes with his hands, let alone with clean tissues. In fact, he was fine as it was, laying there, a little dead. Just a little bit longer, before he had to drag up whatever was left of his soul and the mortal suit barely covering it from the cool, hard floor that had already begun to hurt his joints. He ran out of leftovers, so he still needed to make dinner. And god was that a horrendous, burdensome thought that crushed his will to get up again.

I wish I was dead.

Oh. Naush screwed his face. No, he did not. He did not think that.

Not like, ‘dead’ dead. More like, dead, as in objects. Dead objects that could not be ‘deader’ because they were never alive. Like the speck of dust. Okay, this, Naush could live with.

I wish I was that speck of dust, just sitting right there, not bothering and not bothered.

One couldn’t really get hurt if he never had the ability to want anything, could he? So maybe a speck of dust would do; it didn’t start with a purpose to exist, it just existed, and it didn’t have to justify its existence.

But dust doesn’t just exist though, does it? Where does it come from?

It probably came from Naush himself, he thought. He read somewhere that humans shed dead skin off all the time, leaving little traces of themselves wherever they go and on whatever they touch. A part of the human body is just constantly perishing and quietly leaving the rest of the collective. Little deaths happen every second. Naush’s eyes locked on several slightly more noticeable chunks of grayish balls, with some hair stuck out of them. They were trapped in the corner under the leg of his desk, lying there listlessly. That’s when Naush realized: in this very room of his own, where he burned the midnight oil typing away on his computer; where he dropped his gym bag; where he took interviews; where he chatted on the phone; where he did home workouts; where he invited guys over; where he cried his eyes out; where he checked, time and again, if the lit-up screen of his phone would bring in finally one notification that could inject a dose of endorphins in his brain; his dead-selves had been accumulating at the corner of his desk, not ‘collecting’ but simply ‘becoming’ dust. All the disappointments he told himself to smile through, all the resentment he begrudgingly swallowed, all the invisible bruises for which he couldn’t find the medicine, and all the rejections that made him euthanize another pet passion projects of his; all the little deaths he endured were still here in this very room.

He was the speck of dust he wished to be, lying with his little corpses everywhere.