Since we are all slowly killing each other anyway, with our slander and our hate, it is better to kill quickly now, than to let them die slowly later. Call these mercy killings. The murdered will become the lucky ones, escaping a lifetime of doomscrolling, online political debates, and midnights misspent in front of the keyboard, empty eyes blue in the unforgiving light. There is no happiness to be found there.

I am the new Grim Reaper. My scythe is the inevitability of collapse after a long night of debauchery. I’ve eaten up your hate, which you fed to me, over and over, throughout the years. You gave it to me, or I took it, and now I don’t know how to give it back. And I’ve grown fat off it. Just as you are fat and apathetic and lazy. For I am your own reflection reflecting back at you: your pathetic misery, your self-indulgence, self-pity, and entitlement. All smashed into a black hole of seething hatred and envy. I want more of it. More. Always. I am so hungry.

I am here, in the dark, but you can’t see me or hear me. I am eating your cancer, but your cancer does not shrink. It grows. It grows and grows and grows, like my disgust for you. I don’t know how much more I can take. I hate what you and I both have, what we share, but it seems like I can never get enough. I wonder.. no, I know.. that self-destruction is imminent. And with all of me, all of you will be destroyed too.