About the inevitability of time (Short Story)

Today, a regular eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes of a regular Tuesday in a regular March, Billy was choking. He coughed once or twice and he started breathing as normally as he was going to breathe today. The terrible taste of his own acrid slightly dehydrated saliva was the only thing he had known for five hours. At this point he had stopped crying, not for lack of trying, certainly, but mainly because his eyes had already grew tired of such endeavor.

His left cheek started scaling, or at least it felt as such, from the dried out tears. His right cheek was not, though, it only presented the reddish texture of the crumpled pillowcase of the pillow currently supporting his head. His eyes were red and the skin over his orbits were completely puffy, giving him a funny appearance. Dismally, nobody was near to see him, and even if they tried, the almost complete darkness of the room would make it very hard. 

The shirt Daisy had given him was full of snot. It still smelled like her, though, it still smelled like her perfume, her ”fucking perfume", her ninety-two dollars perfume, which Billy only remembered because that was his last expensive gift to her. It had costed 4 games, or about 2 months of saving money. He was the type of guy that saved 2 months for her, he thought. He was that good. How dare she leave him?

What he and Daisy was special. As he listened to the 10 song mix she had made for him (she was so quirky, making a 10 song mix like if the link she had sent them in was somehow limited to 10 songs like the CD's he was too young to ever sensibly own, let alone somehow have nostalgic attraction to), he thought how perfectly selected each of those 10 songs were. Ten perfect top-100 songs each from his favorite (or at least close to) artists, each song perfectly known by anyone born between 1994 and 1999. Each song with so profound meaning, if he really forced himself to look for such a meaning (but in reality, just 10 popular songs about teenage love). This 10 songs were as perfect and special as their love had been.

They had talked about their children and their names and what languages and instrument they would talk and play to them. They had talked about the cars and the houses and the breed and name of the first and second dogs and first and last cat they would get. They would get maids and drivers because they would afford it. They would live and work as they wished, happily forever, until 860 months from now, when they would be 90 years old, both, and they would either be old and dying happily or cyborgs and living happily.

Their love was special and unrepeated, his mental monologue continued. She had thrown all that away. Never would she love again the way she loved him, never would he, the way he did. Never would they know the true happiness of having someone intimate hold you, or smoking weed with your loved one, or sleeping all a summer afternoon on her house's sofa and waking just to get ice-cream. 

Never will he meet someone whose nose was as perfect as hers. Neither she will meet someone whose voice is as perfect as his.

They were teenagers but their love was special and unique. It was one-of-a-kind, a love Romeo and Juliet would envy. Even though she wasn't the cutest or the smartest, or even the girl he talked to the easiest, he was completely sure this was it. This was the epitome of a relationship.

So he wailed, muffling the heart-breaking sound of someone who cries as if they have destroyed his real essence. He cried without tears, distorting his face into a fearsome visage.

He wished he was dead.

****

Bill looked absent-mindedly at his feet, hunched forth from the right edge of his king-sized bed, half neatly tucked. He had no fire in his eyes. He had been staring at his feet since he sit up, after staring with the same intent the ceiling for some indescribable time, while darkness still shrouded the patio outside the sliding glass door that connected his bedroom with the balcony. Now he could see the sun was high up enough as to not cast any important shadow, and, if he were paying attention, would notice jays had long become silent. But he still felt his vision opaque, sheerly flat.

Today, for first time, he won't ever see Tiff's face again, not even her corpse's rather stiff grimace. Of only photographs and videos his memory will feed, now seeing only the copy of her. The memories of her, the real Tiff, will supplanted for memories of those copies. For the first time after twenty-six years, at age fifty-seven, he knew he was alone.

He felt dead.