Chapter Text
Thirty-four years, and it took a truck to finally get me off my ass.
Rain is falling straight into my eyes, and I don’t have the strength to blink it away. Every breath I take drags out wetter than the one before, and every slight movement causes a sharp pain and shattered ribs to shift under my skin.
My vision keeps losing itself at the edges, and every time it did, an image surfaced from the dark.
A hallway from grade school. My mother’s voice, muffled through a door. The ceiling of my bedroom. A game over screen I must have seen a thousand times.
Is this what they call your life flashing before your eyes?
It’s a lot less dramatic than I imagined.
I expected some sort of cinematic highlight reel. But this was just the truth, laid out flat and boring.
A thirty-four-year-old NEET. Still living under my parent’s roof. Still measuring the shape of my life by how many times I jerked off that week. No love waiting for me anywhere. No one who’d miss the space I used to take up.
Just regret, stacked on regret. Over and over.
How I got here, I’m not even sure I can tell straight anymore.
I was in my room, box of tissues already ready. Then my siblings were there, all at once, shouting before I’d even registered at the door opening. I remember standing up too fast and then a fist crunched against my face before a sharp knee drove up into my stomach.
What did I even do to them in the first place?
I watched my computer go from the floor. Watched it get lifted and slammed until the monitor cracked and the sparks fluttered into the air.
Everything I’d spent collecting, gone in a blink.
Every video, every file, every hour I’d poured into the screen instead of a life. My best friend of the last decade, brutally massacred in front of my eyes.
And then I was outside. Thrown into the dust of the street.
What the hell was I even supposed to do?
I knew the basics, of course. I mean, even an idiot could piece it together.
Find an employment agency. Take whatever part-time work they’d give me. Find a room somewhere which I could stay in. Get back on my feet the proper way.
But those shitty agencies only ever made introductions, and I didn’t even have a resume to introduce. Even then, I’d have to dress for the part and a musty old tracksuit surely wouldn’t cover that.
Hell, I’m not even sure where those agencies are.
And on top of all that, I’d have to take a shower before doing anything.
My life was already over.
I was a selfish man who lived a selfish life, and there was nothing lift in the world that could undo that.
If there was one regret above all the others, it’s that I was going to die a virgin.
There’d been a girl, once. During Junior High, she used to wait by the shoe lockers to that we could walk home together. She was completely average in every sense of the word, but her smile was the clearest of anyone’s.
I never once got the impression she liked me, but what if I’d just tried a little harder back then? Studied a little harder and got into the same high school? Could we have ended up together?
Could my life have gone somewhere normal?
Well, there’s no point thinking about it now. After all, it’ll all be over soon.
When I heard those kids arguing in the street and looked up in time to see the truck barreling toward them, I don’t know what made me move.
But I did.
I turn my head slightly. It’s the only part of my body that still listens.
There’s a light coming through the rain, growing wider the longer I hold it in my eyes. It’s warm, warmer than anything I’ve felt in years, and something in my chest goes quiet.
So this is it. This is supposed to be the part where it doesn’t hurt anymore.
I never believed in anything past this life, but lying here I let myself hope, just once, that I’d been wrong. That there was something on the other side of all this waste, and that it might actually want me.
The grille fills my vision before the thought finishes.
The truck scoops me up and drives me into the wall behind me, pinning me against the concrete and pushing. The metal grinded through what was left of my body until there was no shape left to call mine.
Who was I kidding. A guy like me was never getting into Heaven anyway.