It Fades Away

He walks down the hall to the beat of Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) by Journey playing in his headphones, just quiet enough so people won’t notice as he ambles past. He stares down at the linoleum floor, still polished like a new dress shoe, even after the hoard of feet that nervously scuffled through on the first day of high school.

 

He exits through the back doors to avoid the friendly wave of the ASB president; the same doors at which in four years he will stand and wave to anyone with their head down like his was then.

 

But as he passes, it fades away.

 

He kicks a beer can so old the label’s rubbed off down the sidewalk; past the park at which in six years he will sit on a blanket with his college girlfriend and share a laugh at everything and nothing in particular.

 

But as he passes, it fades away.

 

He crosses the street at the intersection of Maple and Elm, where in ten years he’ll be teaching middle school children more about life than he ever will about the causes of the Spanish American War.

 

But as he passes, it fades away.

 

Two blocks from his house he steps on an old flyer for the blueberry festival, at which in fifteen years he’ll start a conversation with a woman with whom he’ll spend the first two hours talking and the next sixty years loving.

 

But as he passes, it fades away.

 

He unlocks the deadbolt on the door and heads straight upstairs, passing the guest room in which in eighteen years he’ll watch his son sleeping for an eternity, and never grow weary.

 

But as he passes, it fades away.

 

At the desk in his room he begins to write, at the same desk that in fifty-five years he’ll write to his granddaughter responding to her last letter about how she stood up to the bully of a child she had never met, because that’s what her grandpa had taught her to do.

 

But as he writes, it fades away.

 

He puts his pen down and walks over to his pillow, lifting it up to grab the pills he’d stashed underneath three nights before.

 

And the bottle and the body dropped the floor, as peacefully as two drops of rain.

 

And it all faded away.

 

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