John woke up covered in sweat, ice-cold from the breeze coming through an open window. There was a brief (too brief) moment of confusion and loss. It was a comfortable empty space he could inhabit, but it never lasted long. The conscious brain would do what conscious brains do. John often woke up cursing the fact that he was sentient. Once the brain woke up, there was no stopping it. It would do as it desired.
There were reasons John woke up this way, but he was also stuck in a pattern. It was a pattern he didn’t know how to get out of, so he tried not to think about it. He just dealt with the side-effects and fallout. The fallout was often so ugly that it sent him right back into circling death. Like a vulture.
John rolled out of bed. Literally. It was the way he always got up because it allowed him to maintain contact with the bed for a few more seconds. This postponed the misery that was making coffee, showering, trying to eat and failing. He would eventually go, like every day, to the office he couldn’t stand where he made just enough money not to qualify for food stamps. Except on Saturday and Sunday, when he started drinking as soon as his eyes opened.
Taxes were a bitch but he didn’t think about them. He tried not to think of his money as money. He thought of it as a buffer between him and the streets and, as long as he had enough of it, he didn’t concern himself too much about it. There were even days where a life on the streets seemed exciting, preferable to daily grind which paid his bills and kept his belly full of overly-sweet, processed foods.
John figured there was cancer growing in him, some malignant force that was rotting him from the inside out. Sometimes, he thought of the microplastics that probably swirled around the cancerous cells. Sometimes, he was terrified. Sometimes, it made him laugh - how we traded inconvenience for cancer. And then cancer proved to be pretty damn inconvenient.
The heart attack was something he worried about off and on, but never really expected. At first, he wrote off the pain in his chest as heartburn. The pain in his arm as having been slept on wrong. As the minutes passed, however, John realized that his heart was giving up. He was surprised that there was no panic. He had no desire to call for an ambulance. Instead, he made himself a drink and went back to bed. He would be fired, but it didn’t matter.
Firing don’t harm corpses much.
The sun rose because that is what the sun does. Birds sang. Busses ran. No one mourned the loss of John except the homeless man who took bottles out of his recycling. He was momentarily sad, and not just about the lost revenue. He knew that a man had lost his battle. There was peace in that, but also regret. Wasted life is like a rotten tomato dying on the vine, sickly green and bitter beneath the obnoxious brightness of its red skin.
