Someone once told me there was ‘always tomorrow…’
And I naively believed them…
Each night going to bed, foolishly reinforcing that stupid, old trope after yet another wasted day… whilst pining about unspent dreams and romantic spoils from adventures yet to come, and adventures that I’d found excuses to back out of because… you know, excuses…
Well, guess what… there’s not always tomorrow!
Here I lay, all alone in the small, unspent hours of the night waiting.
Waiting for Armageddon
This is it…
My bedroom window is open and I’m not sure if I’m imagining sounds of weeping and gnashing of teeth drifting in on this calm, almost begrudgingly warm, late summer night’s breeze.
Me? I tried to sleep and dream of tomorrow. Why break a lifetime’s habit at the end of the world, huh?
But whatever way I look, conscious and unconscious have aligned. There’s going to be no dreaming for me tonight — just spilt milk and stomach ache.
And I’m not talking about figurative spilt milk.
It was my last carton!
And it was the only thing left that blots out the pain…
Armageddon never really happens the way you think it will though.
But then again… I guess only a select few of us are ever ‘lucky’ enough to get a ticket to the final big game…
Anyway, to get back to the point, you wouldn’t have noticed it at first.
Really you wouldn’t.
It was like slowly going blind if you get what I mean?
Well, what I guess I mean is that it was like the first time you wore glasses. Before, you never noticed your eyes were that bad. You know, they’d just be getting a little worse every day, imperceptibly, until you slowly started to get tired and headachy every time you sat in front of the tube, until eventually you twigged it, and went to see the eye doctor. And then, when you put those glasses on… whoa! It was like waking up to a whole new world again, wondering why the hell you hadn’t noticed your eyes had been that wrong before, even though the pointers had been there all the time (like sitting in the dark and hazy bar and turning to chat to your best buddy next to you, only to realise — hell that wasn’t your buddy — it was a complete stranger! And you’d be chatting to them for ten minutes… and your buddy, well they were off outside, having a great time making a move on someone else). Yeah, it sucked… It really did. But it really was like that. Totally. Imperceptible, until you woke up one day and suddenly noticed the whole world had changed around you.
And then it was too late.
Hey, but all that had been and gone now and there was nothing that you, me or anyone could have done about it even if we’d wanted to.
A few of us thought there was at first. But that didn’t work out so well. Really, it didn’t… But, hey, I don’t wanna talk about that too much right now.
Did I tell you? My stomach kinda aches right now.
All I wanna do is drink some milk, lie face down and hold my stomach for a bit
and sleep…
Sleep deep.
You know, the big, long, lonely kind of sleep.
But I don’t have any goddamned milk…
And I spilt my last carton two hours ago...
Oh, and I forgot to tell you…
Cartoned milk is the only goddamned thing that seems to slow the whole goddamned process down, you know?
The whole pain and dying process, kinda thing…
Goddamnit, my stomach really aches…
And you know what? I wasn’t imagining the sounds of weeping and gnashing of teeth… ‘cos that’s the exact noise I’m making right now.
Right…
I’ve got no time…
I need to sleep.
Sleep and dream of tomorrow.
