Zimmerman and Associates

Somewhere along the way I realize I just needed to lose myself in the meaningless of it all. It was the only way to find some porcelain type of meaning to such brackish time, minutes of my life slipping way into the ether. On my deathbed I knew I would wish I could swap out this time, replace it, relive it, use it to extend my living time just a last few desperate breaths, to spill my guts to my last remaining friend, a golden-headed stranger of a nurse.

Tell her all the gnarled secrets that had been building up my whole life: how I had a crush on Susan Holmberg in the third grade and never told her; how I had been the one to rip the pages out of Steve Garland's book in an act of petty revenge; how I had poured bleach on my neighbor's car when I was moving out because I was too much of a coward to tell him what a revolting burn-out I thought he was during the two years I lived there in silent hatred; how I had refused my uncle that loan and spread lies about him after he had helped my parents support me through school; all the spilt milk and sex dreams I never had; about how when my father would speak to me I always wanted to fall asleep in the middle, not because I was ever that tired that I couldn't keep my eyes open, but just because I wanted to as a kind of statement; how I had never bothered to have the children who should have been taking care of me right now and listening to this lifetime of regrets and triumphs because I was afraid and too self-absorbed to give the little runts any of my time or my youth, because I was afraid I might end up secretly hating them, or worse yet, because I was afraid I'd end up as emotionally distant and bitterly judgmental a father as my own was after years of setting his skin alight under a torch-lit sea.

Yes, I would surely want these minutes back, but here I was none the less--my wrinkled future-self struggling, desperate, weak-kneed and ocean-eyed, reaching his china fingers back through the stacks to demand an exchange of time, precious time--and the only thing to do was to lose myself in the passing of every velvet second.

The computer crashed, I lost all the work I had been doing. At first I was angry, until I realized it didn't matter anyway. If I had completed this tower of papers, quivering like a heart attack above me, they would just give me another, in which case I would just have to begin again anyways. What matter was it if it was this stack or that stack? Losing my work meant nothing because progress did not exist. It was futile, empty, pointless, boring, Zen, nirvana, ahistorical, never-ending, unchanging, soul-numbing, repetitious fucking nonsense, nonsense, idiotic nonsense...

I closed my eyes, tasted the air full and long, and began again with no anger.

I would have no extra breaths on that coming final day, those death drums finally pounding out my name from distant black hills. A task, like a life, has no meaning if it has no end.