Life has given me lemons. I’ve made all of my lemonade. What now? There’s nothing left.
There’s coffee left. Hot, black coffee. Searing my throat, bringing tears to my eyes with ferocious bitterness, filling my body with black. Coffee is meant to be drunk grimly, without a smile. I surely have no smiles of my own left. But once the bitter drink winds it way around my body and makes its way to my brain, the chemicals do the work for me. Jumping, hyper, practically bouncing off the walls, and laughing. Not laughing at humor, for there is nothing truly funny left, but laughter is all the same, is it not?
Oh, how cursed a life to live, with a beverage as my only pleasure. How can there be nothing left? There is the world before me! But I’ve seen it all. I have watched the very continents shift before my eyes, and travelled to each and every one countless times. I’ve sat and watched for centuries as groups of human beings evolved into something different: the Africans, the Asians, the Europeans. It had the interest factor of paint drying to begin with, and now even that’s more or less stopped. I enjoyed a black sort of pleasure by turning each of the groups of humans against each other, as a subliminal revenge for being so dreary. It was less hard than one might think; prejudice, ignorance, and hate are all deeply ingrained in the human mind. But that was soon over in a matter of mere centuries, and I retreated back to the coffee room.
At least humans have gotten mildly more interesting, what with all the fancy things they’ve invented. I tried poking a little bit at those new-fangled nuclear technologies, see if I could get anything fun out of them. The secret for turning them into bombs with whispered in the ear of a certain promising genius, Albert Einstein, and it was quickly picked up by scientists. The world’s most powerful weapons quickly followed, and I grinned in pleasure as I watched my ticket out of this world be constructed. Things were almost going my way as the famous Cold War began, but the results were disappointing. The Cold War never turned hot, as I had planned. The Earth remained intact, and I nearly went insane. I had to get out. I had to! But how, how could I ever manage? It was one person against 7 billion. I could never do it.
I sat in my favorite chair, an authentic ancient Egyption throne, with my cup of coffee. I took a quarter of a second to appreciate Canada, the only place in the world where you could buy industrial-sized bags of coffee at a grocery store. But only a quarter of a second; I still hated Canada quite as much as every other blasted country on Earth. I clenched my jaw, wishing that they would all just die so that I could die as well. There had to be a way…right? Humans were practically on the verge of killing themselves, what with all the environmental messes and overpopulation and the nuclear bombings that had come close to total destruction in the past. There were rumors that the 21st of December would be the end of the world, and it could actually very easily happen around that general timeframe. If only, if only. I absentmindedly drew a blade down my wrists the way some people bit their nails while thinking. The cuts healed instantly, no blood spilled. I always held some tiny speck of hope in me that maybe, just maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could die early.
I bitterly regretted the pact I had made. I was born in the year 3145. Things were looking bad then; global warming was causing massive storms, overpopulation was draining resources faster than the planet could handle, pollution was taking every 1 in 3 lives from various terrifying ailments. I was scared, so scared. When I found the bottle, when I was offered the last remaining wish, I didn’t hesitate. I wished that I would not die until I was the last person left. I didn’t want to live forever, of course. I didn’t want to be left wandering the planet for eternity, completely alone. But I wanted to live longer; I wanted to be able to avoid worry about contaminated water, smoky ashen air, burning acid rain, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes, death by thirst or hunger as the world’s water and food rapidly disappeared. I expected that I would live long enough to say goodbye and then peacefully die in a few hundred years with the very last of the planet.
What I didn’t expect was being transported back in time 70 million years.
Instead of having my life extended only slightly, more preserved than prolonged, I was forced to live through millions and millions of years of nothing. I wandered empty plains until I couldn’t stand it a second longer. I swam across entire oceans, and dove to the very bottoms to meet the fish and other sea life. I explored mountains and chasms; I climbed to the tops of volcanoes. Anyone would have positively killed for the chances I had to explore nature, but no one would want to be me. I was alone. Agonizingly, torturously alone. For millions upon millions of years, the only life that existed was trees, insects, and simple, dumb animals. Not even insanity could give me peace, as I was trapped in a sane, perfectly aware mental state. For 70 million years, and then some, I was confined to total and absolute solitude, silence ringing in my ears for longer than any being has ever even been imagined to live.
I still don’t know how I got through it. I don’t know how I managed to make it this far. All I know is that the world has to end soon. Every second longer I lived was another second of unbearable torture. I’d lived through dungeons and witch burnings and the Spanish Inquisition, but nothing has ever been more painful than the sheer fact of my lonely, cursed life. I can’t take it anymore – I cannot! The ticks of the clock burn like fire, attacking my mind with swords and daggers that inflict triple the normal pain with each stroke and yet spill no blood. The boiling coffee that burns my throat is no less than pleasurable, as a sweet distraction from the torment of time.
Suddenly, I heard screams outside my window. I rushed to it, curiosity and a tiny glimmer of hope propelling me forward, to see the largest fire of my life. I hurry outside to greet the mountains of flame and curling black smoke, heating up the air like an oven. The screams quickly stopped: everyone had died. No surprise there; my house must have been at least 200 degrees inside, and I lived about a mile away. I would have run (immortality did not stop me from feeling physical pain), but the flames were moving too fast for me to outrun. Instead, I ventured inside out of curiosity. It was painful, of course, but I’d been through fires before. Me walking through a flaming city was somewhat akin to a Canadian walking through Death Valley in July.
It wasn’t difficult to see the cause of the fire. A colossal cavern had opened up, splitting the city (and likely several more cities) in two. Lava was spurting out, burning everything in the general vicinity and spreading fire to the rest. I quickly turned and ran from it; fire was one thing, but lava was quite another. I’d had a bad run with a volcano in prehistoric times, and was not eager to have another encounter. But despite the danger, the glimmer of hope inside me grew. Land did not simply split a mile apart for no reason. Something was happening, and whatever it was, it might be able to contribute to my death. Breathing hard, I raced outside of the city until I reached a lake that the flames hadn’t been able to pass through. As I was swimming through the cold water, so sweet after the flames, it hit me. The day. Today was December 21st. The rumors were true, and soon the world would end. My long, lonely, horrible existence was at last about to end.
Of course, this wasn’t certain; not set in stone. There were bound to be a handful of survivors in some manner, considering the capabilities of today’s technology. I had to be among them. If not, I could end up trapped somewhere in a pool of lava burning for centuries or longer. I had to be among the survivors, so that I could massacre them, so that I could make certain the human race was extinguished, so that I could finally know peace after so many millions of years. I at last had a chance. I could not waste it. I began to swim up from the bottom of the lake, until something happened.
My lungs began burning for air. The sensation was unfamiliar; I hadn’t needed air since the day I made the wish. I’d swum halfway across the world before and never once found it necessary to break the surface. I was struck with an intense hope – accompanied by a gripping fear. It was time for me to die, I knew. The rest of the world had been terminated quicker than I expected, and I was soon going to follow. This was what I had yearned for for so long, but somehow it wasn’t what I expected. I’d thought that I would go peacefully, with a sense of great relief, like when you finally fall asleep after days of exhaustion. I hadn’t thought there would be fear. But now that I was finally facing the end, I was scared of what lay ahead. I feared to think of what would spring out when the doors of death were at last unlocked.
It was too late. The surface was too far up. I was going to die. It was for the best, anyways. I had lived far too long. It was time to die. I looked back on my past, on my long and lonely past, stretching so far back the beginning was a blurring haze, and I was glad that my long, long story was at last coming to an end. The colors around me faded to black as my consciousness slipped away, and I whispered my last goodbye to the Earth.
There’s coffee left. Hot, black coffee. Searing my throat, bringing tears to my eyes with ferocious bitterness, filling my body with black. Coffee is meant to be drunk grimly, without a smile. I surely have no smiles of my own left. But once the bitter drink winds it way around my body and makes its way to my brain, the chemicals do the work for me. Jumping, hyper, practically bouncing off the walls, and laughing. Not laughing at humor, for there is nothing truly funny left, but laughter is all the same, is it not?
Oh, how cursed a life to live, with a beverage as my only pleasure. How can there be nothing left? There is the world before me! But I’ve seen it all. I have watched the very continents shift before my eyes, and travelled to each and every one countless times. I’ve sat and watched for centuries as groups of human beings evolved into something different: the Africans, the Asians, the Europeans. It had the interest factor of paint drying to begin with, and now even that’s more or less stopped. I enjoyed a black sort of pleasure by turning each of the groups of humans against each other, as a subliminal revenge for being so dreary. It was less hard than one might think; prejudice, ignorance, and hate are all deeply ingrained in the human mind. But that was soon over in a matter of mere centuries, and I retreated back to the coffee room.
At least humans have gotten mildly more interesting, what with all the fancy things they’ve invented. I tried poking a little bit at those new-fangled nuclear technologies, see if I could get anything fun out of them. The secret for turning them into bombs with whispered in the ear of a certain promising genius, Albert Einstein, and it was quickly picked up by scientists. The world’s most powerful weapons quickly followed, and I grinned in pleasure as I watched my ticket out of this world be constructed. Things were almost going my way as the famous Cold War began, but the results were disappointing. The Cold War never turned hot, as I had planned. The Earth remained intact, and I nearly went insane. I had to get out. I had to! But how, how could I ever manage? It was one person against 7 billion. I could never do it.
I sat in my favorite chair, an authentic ancient Egyption throne, with my cup of coffee. I took a quarter of a second to appreciate Canada, the only place in the world where you could buy industrial-sized bags of coffee at a grocery store. But only a quarter of a second; I still hated Canada quite as much as every other blasted country on Earth. I clenched my jaw, wishing that they would all just die so that I could die as well. There had to be a way…right? Humans were practically on the verge of killing themselves, what with all the environmental messes and overpopulation and the nuclear bombings that had come close to total destruction in the past. There were rumors that the 21st of December would be the end of the world, and it could actually very easily happen around that general timeframe. If only, if only. I absentmindedly drew a blade down my wrists the way some people bit their nails while thinking. The cuts healed instantly, no blood spilled. I always held some tiny speck of hope in me that maybe, just maybe, if I tried hard enough, I could die early.
I bitterly regretted the pact I had made. I was born in the year 3145. Things were looking bad then; global warming was causing massive storms, overpopulation was draining resources faster than the planet could handle, pollution was taking every 1 in 3 lives from various terrifying ailments. I was scared, so scared. When I found the bottle, when I was offered the last remaining wish, I didn’t hesitate. I wished that I would not die until I was the last person left. I didn’t want to live forever, of course. I didn’t want to be left wandering the planet for eternity, completely alone. But I wanted to live longer; I wanted to be able to avoid worry about contaminated water, smoky ashen air, burning acid rain, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes, death by thirst or hunger as the world’s water and food rapidly disappeared. I expected that I would live long enough to say goodbye and then peacefully die in a few hundred years with the very last of the planet.
What I didn’t expect was being transported back in time 70 million years.
Instead of having my life extended only slightly, more preserved than prolonged, I was forced to live through millions and millions of years of nothing. I wandered empty plains until I couldn’t stand it a second longer. I swam across entire oceans, and dove to the very bottoms to meet the fish and other sea life. I explored mountains and chasms; I climbed to the tops of volcanoes. Anyone would have positively killed for the chances I had to explore nature, but no one would want to be me. I was alone. Agonizingly, torturously alone. For millions upon millions of years, the only life that existed was trees, insects, and simple, dumb animals. Not even insanity could give me peace, as I was trapped in a sane, perfectly aware mental state. For 70 million years, and then some, I was confined to total and absolute solitude, silence ringing in my ears for longer than any being has ever even been imagined to live.
I still don’t know how I got through it. I don’t know how I managed to make it this far. All I know is that the world has to end soon. Every second longer I lived was another second of unbearable torture. I’d lived through dungeons and witch burnings and the Spanish Inquisition, but nothing has ever been more painful than the sheer fact of my lonely, cursed life. I can’t take it anymore – I cannot! The ticks of the clock burn like fire, attacking my mind with swords and daggers that inflict triple the normal pain with each stroke and yet spill no blood. The boiling coffee that burns my throat is no less than pleasurable, as a sweet distraction from the torment of time.
Suddenly, I heard screams outside my window. I rushed to it, curiosity and a tiny glimmer of hope propelling me forward, to see the largest fire of my life. I hurry outside to greet the mountains of flame and curling black smoke, heating up the air like an oven. The screams quickly stopped: everyone had died. No surprise there; my house must have been at least 200 degrees inside, and I lived about a mile away. I would have run (immortality did not stop me from feeling physical pain), but the flames were moving too fast for me to outrun. Instead, I ventured inside out of curiosity. It was painful, of course, but I’d been through fires before. Me walking through a flaming city was somewhat akin to a Canadian walking through Death Valley in July.
It wasn’t difficult to see the cause of the fire. A colossal cavern had opened up, splitting the city (and likely several more cities) in two. Lava was spurting out, burning everything in the general vicinity and spreading fire to the rest. I quickly turned and ran from it; fire was one thing, but lava was quite another. I’d had a bad run with a volcano in prehistoric times, and was not eager to have another encounter. But despite the danger, the glimmer of hope inside me grew. Land did not simply split a mile apart for no reason. Something was happening, and whatever it was, it might be able to contribute to my death. Breathing hard, I raced outside of the city until I reached a lake that the flames hadn’t been able to pass through. As I was swimming through the cold water, so sweet after the flames, it hit me. The day. Today was December 21st. The rumors were true, and soon the world would end. My long, lonely, horrible existence was at last about to end.
Of course, this wasn’t certain; not set in stone. There were bound to be a handful of survivors in some manner, considering the capabilities of today’s technology. I had to be among them. If not, I could end up trapped somewhere in a pool of lava burning for centuries or longer. I had to be among the survivors, so that I could massacre them, so that I could make certain the human race was extinguished, so that I could finally know peace after so many millions of years. I at last had a chance. I could not waste it. I began to swim up from the bottom of the lake, until something happened.
My lungs began burning for air. The sensation was unfamiliar; I hadn’t needed air since the day I made the wish. I’d swum halfway across the world before and never once found it necessary to break the surface. I was struck with an intense hope – accompanied by a gripping fear. It was time for me to die, I knew. The rest of the world had been terminated quicker than I expected, and I was soon going to follow. This was what I had yearned for for so long, but somehow it wasn’t what I expected. I’d thought that I would go peacefully, with a sense of great relief, like when you finally fall asleep after days of exhaustion. I hadn’t thought there would be fear. But now that I was finally facing the end, I was scared of what lay ahead. I feared to think of what would spring out when the doors of death were at last unlocked.
It was too late. The surface was too far up. I was going to die. It was for the best, anyways. I had lived far too long. It was time to die. I looked back on my past, on my long and lonely past, stretching so far back the beginning was a blurring haze, and I was glad that my long, long story was at last coming to an end. The colors around me faded to black as my consciousness slipped away, and I whispered my last goodbye to the Earth.
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