He walked alone, of course alone, with the low ball of orange light cascading his shadow far in front of him. If he fell down, he knew he could meet his shadow. There would be no more variables in the world. If no shadow was made, he could easily disappear into nothingness. His fate resigned to never having made an imprint, a shadow, on society.
But that was not the point as he plodded down each block; his clothes hanging off of him as if they weren’t his. There were more important things in the world than making an imprint, like surviving. As selfish as it was, he had to survive against all costs. But it shouldn’t have happened this way, he kept muttering under his breath. Why? It was a simple one-worded question that had no discernible answer.
Home was now within his sights. He looked at his watch; he had been walking intently for twenty minutes now, not paying attention to his surroundings, ignoring the most obvious of signs that we all make mistakes and don’t always pay for them. Finally he got to the door of his apartment and turned the key that had been turned by so many people, so many times before him.
He made his way past the hall tree that had been a gift from his parents and the aloe plant that had thrived in its southern window. He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He recognized the face well, but there were changes. The eyes were not as bright as they had once been, the hair was a mess, and bags under his eyes were beginning to form. He couldn’t look at himself anymore.
The sun that fed the aloe plant now crept in through the bedroom window where he lay, sprawled, on his bed. He wished he had the effort to take off his shirt and hang it up. He wished he had the effort to take the keys out of his left-hand pocket as they created a pain in his thigh when he rolled over. But he felt he deserved the pain; the pain was the one thing that had never deserted him. His eyes took one last look at the ray of sunlight creeping across his aloe plant and down to the beige carpet below. Then they closed.
He dreamed that he inhabited a room of no right angles and strange lighting, like some German expressionist film. Depth and perception had no place in this dream or this room. He was putting on a tuxedo shirt and getting ready to go to the theater. It was like old times again, he thought. Suddenly the door to this multi-angled room swung open and standing there was an old woman. She was dressed in rags and stunk of the sewer. Before he could say anything, she barked out sentences in Latin or Lithuanian. He had never heard the language but it made perfect sense. Everything had come into place. And then the door swung shut and he was left standing there choking on the stench of the old woman.
He awoke with a start and looked at the clock. Only one minute had passed since he collapsed on the bed. He tried to remember the dream now, but couldn’t. The present reality was the only thing he could focus on. What had he done?
What had he done?
