-A quarter century and he’s wasted it, the only experience he’ll have of it but something keeps him from actualizing it. He feels it some days. Days when he feels the waste slowing him down and all he could do is sit quietly and watch it all pass by, Life. His spinal chord falls into an odd curvature his frame slouched on the wooden chair behind the window. He looks through as the light splashes and traces shapes around him. He watches the shapes of bodies passing in front of him without noticing him. He could wait there, in that position for his experience to expire and he would be fine with it, but in those moments, what pains him most is that he must get up and continue. His expectations are low, they’ve fallen; he was once a great optimist and even though at times, that possibility allows him to will himself out of bed, it hardly if at all makes itself present after that exhausting morning feat.
His eyes droop. Perpetually tired, it’s a state, which has become more common in his days. He goes through these stages like the moon. A shifting inside him, some kind of internal clock, which he has no control over. Now, it is winter and spring’s showers have grown confused and come early. As the rain cascades outside in the frigid night, these days, he’ll usually stumble around the small confines of his apartment and early in the earth’s gyration, fall to slumber. He doesn’t have much energy left. After waking and dragging himself through the compulsory actions of life, he’s spent by the time he returns to the small apartment. The voice in his head doesn’t so much as moan by this point. It’s all over and he’s still young. He’ll lie there sometimes, eyes closed, a slight tremble as the cold air seeps in through the closed window’s frame. He’ll think about the lives he could have had, those lives he dreamt about in childhood. The lives that in year’s past, in the more optimistic moments, he might have even thought he was destined for.
There have been moments in which he felt destined for some greatness. Taking stock of all the wondrous ideas, often idealist as they were, he felt they had to mean something. Perhaps a summons from some greater force, an acknowledgement to him that his destiny was already chosen; A confirmation of that feeling coursing in the passages of his arteries, bringing a semblance of passion to him. Now, he lets it all go. All these ideas, and nothing. They’ve meant nothing. He settles into the old couch and stares at the dark room wishing he could have held onto these wonderful ideas and somehow breathed life into them, wishes he could have held onto those who so deeply affected him, wishes he could replace himself now with himself then, the one that existed for brief moments. The one that believed that alliances between souls were eternal. It was then, younger, he believed there was purpose in every word spared from silence, and in every moment shared between two.
Now he’ll sit there, when his energy has left him and wonder if this is all some experiment. All an observation of the outcome of great hopes in broken bones.
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