A Life in Slow Motion

It wasn't that he didn't care any more. To actually not care would have taken a level of energy and effort that he just didn't have left. Just getting out of bed in the morning wasn't even an act of will any longer, it was just something his body did because it didn't know what else to do. Not that there was even a real reason to get out of bed, just an empty day full of empty hours counting down an empty life. Wake up, shower, dress, eat, rinse and repeat.

It wasn't a life, yet it wasn't death, either, but some horrible hybrid of the two, a kind of nether world where time passed and yet really didn't, since every hour was exactly the same as the one that had preceded it. Death, at least, would have had a finality to it, instead of just the terminal ennui of being stretched so thin that even the capacity to recognize that stretching was lost.

He did nothing, and yet he was so tired. Tired of living, tired of dying, tired of being in that in-between world that was neither of the two. Most of all, he was tired of fighting. He had believed, once, that there were things worth fighting for, worth the effort and the blood and the tears, worth clawing his way back to his feet every time he'd been knocked down.

But he found, in the end, that he could only take so many hits. In the end, he would survive, or he wouldn't, and it really didn't matter much to him which one his fate would be. He was going to lose in the end, and he could look into the empty years looming in front of him and see that.

Would it really matter if that end came sooner rather than later? He didn't even think about that any more, just waited passively for what woud come next, staring blindly at the headlights bearing down on him. His friends were gone, now, some dead, but most just drifted away, and he no longer knew how to reach out to them, to any one. The girl he should have married was long gone, too, lost forever due to an incredible act of insensitivity or simply because he had been too blind to see the opportunity that had been offered him.

He had nothing, and he would leave nothing behind. It was funny, in a way, after a lifetime of helping other people, of wading through the blood an wreckage of their lives to put them back together, that there was no one there for him. A cosmic practical joke, perhaps, continuing proof that no good deed ever goes unpunished.