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In Praise Of Sun In Libra

Imagine for a moment that you woke up in the morning and you were the only person on Earth. Mysteriously, when you were asleep, everyone simply vanished. Once that fact finally settles in with you, you realize what a great opportunity this is for you.

Hooray! No more nagging from that overbearing boss of yours! No more infuriating arguments on the Internet! No one demanding your attention with e-mails and text messages and phone calls! You are absolutely free from the tyranny of Other People!

Once it truly sinks in how much you are now (literally) in charge of your world, you begin to act accordingly. You wander down the street in your underwear. You steal a police car and drive it around, sirens blaring. After a while, driving on the street gets boring so you start driving through people’s yards instead. Yee-ha!

So you end up at the mall to do some casual looting. After a while you notice some other oddities. All the posters and artwork have gone blank. All the clothes in all the stores are exactly the same shade of grey. Mysteriously, all the tunes on your phone have vanished as well. It appears that you have the world to yourself — but wherever everyone else went, they took their creativity and color with them.

You realize you’re hungry so you wander off the the grocery store. All the fresh food is gone and there are only cans. Long rows of grey, identical cans without any labels. There are no clerks to help you out. It occurs to you that the saying “hell is other people” is perhaps the exact opposite of the truth.

Then you hear a phone ring somewhere off in the distance, and you rush off towards that sound like a maniac. It’s coming from the mall’s food court, and you run there as fast as you can before that phone stops ringing, hoping that there is someone… anyone!… who you can talk to. You find a cell phone sitting on a table and you pick it up and —

It wasn’t a phone call. It was an alarm, reminding someone of an important event. “Date Night, get groceries” the screen on the phone says.

And then somewhere, far away from you, an untended power relay fails and you and the mall are plunged into darkness… and no one is there to hear your cries of despair.

And that’s when you realize it: this morning, you woke up in a world with no Libra.