May 30, 2017 2am
He doesn't write much anymore.
"Nearly forty", he thought, "I am nearly forty."
The bus is usually crowded on Monday nights, and most of the time he is stuck standing for the forty-five-minute bus ride home from work. Tonight, he managed, by some act of god, to weasel into a window seat. He didn't have to wait; it was there. He could rest his head against the window and take in the cities neon at midnight. Dreams of his past, images of rainy nights and the abstract forms created by passing car's head lights and brake lights bouncing off puddles and refracting through the bus window. He would ease his camera to his chin and sneak shots of strangers. He never wondered what they were thinking. He knew they were in the same place as he was; in a realm of leftover daydreams and tired ghosts of hope. In moments such as these, his heart (or the place where his heart was supposed to be) ached and sadness swelled in him, through him, over him, until it enveloped everyone on the bus, in the city, in the world. Often, a tear would form and sneak past his fingers to land on his lips. The salt of pain. Sad seasoning? Through his camera's lens, he could gaze past those strange eyes and into places where no one should go, but he felt invited. The surrounding atmosphere of sorrow wasn't, to him, what it was to everyone else. It was where he lived, always, and it was not a dreaded locale. If it was possible, he would call it happiness. Not the feeling of sadness, but the feeling. It pricked his skin and left blood. It was proof that this, whatever, was still active. It was reassurance that there remained potential and kinetic - the present was still just that. He was cursed with the knowledge (as if handed an apple by a snake if snakes had hands) of death, and that is not a statement one can make in casual conversation without some heavy explaining.
Of course, most people are aware that one day he or she will die, but most people can't wrap their heads around the concept of not being anymore. They try but the thought process takes the MC Escher staircase to up-down-left-right NOWHERE, the tongue is tied, and a friend must apply a pinch to bring them back. His awareness was full blown AIDS to their runny nose. It would hit him like a steamroller- slow, deliberate, painful, and it would last forever.
His dreams have been plagued with this knowledge since he could remember. He would be somewhere, like a cafe or his living room, and when he would bring his mug of coffee or a spoon of ice cream to his lips he would notice that there was nothing. He would remember that there used to be a, something, a taste? Then the boulder would gain momentum and boom, boom, boom! Down the hill, through the valley, knocking over homes, smashing children and grandmas and bushes and even that guy who always asks you for a cigarette when, for once, he really did not have any. He would remember being alive, and he would then know that he was not. His eyes would take in the room and he would know that this is now IT. Those other people are no longer with him, and his eternity is this nothing in a place of nothing with no feelings or sensations. Hell? That would be correct. That is what he thought, but not in a biblical sense. This was his personal hell; his place of eternal punishment for not being the best living man he could have been. Not that he was bad because he was not. He was decent at his worst. His fault was that he wasted so much life destroying himself with regret, guilt, sympathy, wonder and hope. The hours he threw away thinking to himself "I threw away twenty years on what? Booze, drugs, and woman who didn't give a damn about me? Now, it's too late. I am almost forty, what the fuck can I do? I fucking ruined it. I threw away my life." He did, but not with those common errors that stole time, damaged his reputation, and increased the level of difficulty in an already difficult game. Those errors are, even though they are unsatisfactory, part of living. The stagnating, the absence of action, the giving into his new demons, the loss of desire and passion, those are symptoms of decay and part of death.
In the desert at midnight on a Monday, he took the bus home from work. His window seat let him dream, and the dreams took him everywhere. They brought him back to his childhood, his first kiss, the day his dad died, all of his losses and gains. When the bus reached his stop, though, it was time for him to wake up.
