Short Story on Life Experience – Time to Die
It was strange what thoughts went through his mind as he tried to sit up in the street. In everyday life he had been filled with regret and disappointment, everything had been a chore to be repeated endlessly, his job, his relationships, even eating and sleeping. He’d mope through meals as he shoveled whatever food he could easily lay his hands upon into his mouth and chew on it listlessly, methodically, joylessly. Then it was off to work or to the bar or to some other activity that had grown monotonous long ago but that he was unable to change out of habit. Somehow it was easier to drift in circles.
He was like a lab rat that had become afraid to leave his cage, a sailing ship tethered to the sea bed. Forces compelled him and the winds howled and shifted but the anchor of his life had become too firmly embedded. He was a comet drifting through oblivion but slowly, inexorably falling into some distant sun, a faint pin prick of death always visible across what seemed an eternity of space and time. He had told himself there was still time to change course and break away, but somehow he had known that it was too late, that it had been too late for a long time.
But now as he fell back into the pool of his blood he was forced to look up into the rainy gray skies and feel the cool beads of water as they splashed down on his face. His face slumped to one side and he examined the dirty sidewalk and the multitude of shoes gathering around him. The leather shoes of business men, the cheaper shoes of police officers closing in and cordoning him off, the ebb and flow of wet sneakers, high heels and boots that pushed in curiously to examine him but were then pulled back by fear, by those who were involved. A sea of bystanders channeled and damned off by the police and paramedics.
A young police officer stooped and bent to look into his face and tell him that everything would be OK. He could see but only faintly hear the ambulance as it stopped a short distance from him, he watched the emergency medical technicians unload a gurney and bags of liquids and medicines but they all knew that this was just for show, for proper form. He couldn’t help thinking that he had had a good run all things considered. He felt like a poor student might upon finally finishing college or some other long and burdensome task, but he realized that he loved his life all the same.
He wondered why only now, so close to the end, he no longer felt trapped, afraid or disappointed. He had wasted his life, he had let the days pass him in a dull succession and blur together into a shallow, empty ritual of apathy. Why had he not lived, and why now, when he could no longer do anything about it, did this no longer bother him? Maybe all lives were essentially wasted, dominated by the mundane and everyday movements between events that lost meaning and feeling as they faded into a past that was nothing more than a half remembered dream.
He could no longer imagine the love or hate that he had once felt for people, the time and energy for these feelings had passed and disappeared so gradually that he had failed to notice. He awoke one day and all good or strong feelings were gone. There was only a nagging emptiness, a need to keep moving that had no reason.
And now it was all over and he felt happy and satisfied and had no idea why. He would miss life, even what little that was his own. There was no epiphany, there was no great secret. He had lived what had seemed a strange and pointless life, and now he was dying a meaningless death on the pavement, half asleep in his blood in the rain.
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