Decay

This is a sick world. People are born, grow old, fall ill, and die in it, yet different people all walk paths that are more or less the same.

Those who stray from the track are always punished. Is that a kind of "judgment," in a sense?

When you think someone is "sick," you don't realize that in their eyes, you're the one who's "sick."

Who gets to decide? Who gets to define it? Who is the judge?

It doesn't matter. None of it matters anymore.

Because everything is rotting away somewhere out of sight.

Background:

Everyone in the story except the little girl has death phobia.

Death phobia is a mental illness, a type of psychological phobia. It is often caused by distorted inner emotional experiences and prolonged or repeated exposure to real-world stressors.

Its main clinical features include fear of specific things, including natural phenomena such as death. The fear is often triggered by hallucinations, illusions, and delusions, and can become intense during deep hallucinations. During an episode, in addition to extreme mental distress, sufferers experience pronounced autonomic nervous system symptoms, such as palpitations, shortness of breath, frequent urges to urinate, trembling limbs, and profuse sweating. The fear is often mixed with symptoms such as anxiety. Death phobia, for instance, is more often expressed as anxiety about one's own future death, leading to autonomic nervous system dysfunction.

The little girl is a normal person living in a world where everyone else is sick.

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