Censorship.

The lights have gone out. With a whirr, the electricity surged and cut out with a definitive and inexplicable 'slurp!', taunting me as if finishing the last strand of spaghetti, and with just as much selfishness.

Blackouts are a queer thing. I step outside, and want to laugh as a dozen neighbors stare back at me from their own dilapidated porches, each of them with a hand to the forehead...protecting their digitised eyes from the cold light of day. Stepping out of the technological haze that is life in the 21st century. Life in the fast lane.

We are all thinking the same thing. What to do now?

I once read an article about blackouts. Nine months following a large blackout in Sweden, the number of babies born tripled. I find it almost comforting that when in doubt, the human species will inevitably revert back to one-on-one entertainment. The kind they had before iPods and Playstations...even before television and computers. There is something illustrious in thoughts of flesh against flesh in the dark. Something soothing.

I have no such option. It is twilight, and I am alone. I was not counting on being alone.

A family visit minus the family. Alone in a house that was once my home - if not in sentiment, certainly in name. I often feel I am in a family all by myself. A tumultuous ideal. A family without bitter words, complications or hatchetts - neither buried nor sharpened. One that is also devoid of any sort of warmth - and I am cold, as I knew I must be eventually.

It makes me wish that I was a different person...one who they thought was funny or interesting. Likeable. Lovable. I hate them for making me think it, because I like being myself. And anyway, everyone else is taken.