He woke up in the middle of the night, after a few hours of drifting between slumber and wakefulness. It was very early in the morning, close to four, maybe, and his hand ran over his body only to feel a that a thin film of sweat covered it. The man opened his eyes, sighed audibly, and crossed his room almost in its entirety in a few steps. He reached a washing basin, cracked and yellowed with age, turned the tap that freed sweet, cold water and sunk his face in it. After a length of time he looked up. A forlorn, hackneyed mirror presented him with the reflection of someone that looked so much like himself, but so much older, so... tired. Spent.
He inspected the face that stood staring at him, and he thought, 'how did this happen? It was only yesterday that I felt so young...'
And he sighed again.
Looking at the mirror once more, he realized how haggard he looked : his cheekbones were protuberant, a sure sign that he wasn't eating as often as he ought to. His beard was frayed, and sported now only a few patches of a dark colour, which might have once been black, but no longer.
He walked slowly back to his bed, and sat down. He looked to the walls, and saw a number of things he once held dear : photos of loved ones, long gone but never forgotten, and books. He went to pick up a book, any book, a random one would have done, but as his hand reaches for the shelf, he finds it empty of anything.
Ah, one of those. A vision. The ghost of things past. He managed a smile, and turned his back slowly to what wasn't there anymore. His eyes surveyed his room. To call it spartan would have been a compliment. Nothing but a chair at one corner of the dimly lit cubicle kept company to the creaking bed and the basin. A few pieces of threadbare clothing lay strewn on the floor.
A surge of weariness overcame him, and he slept.
He dreamt. He dreamt of a future, a future so distant that the mere thought of it was mind-blowing. For some reason, he alone had survived all of mankind, and his impossibly older self roamed the cosmos on an asteroid, improbably called 'December'. Strange, though, was the fact that he knew that somehow this was destined to happen. The misanthrope he dreamt of certainly seemed to share his fatigue, and... huh. He could have sworn that the older man of his dream suddenly had started to look more intently at something, and when he tried to focus through his eyes, he swore he could see his now-self looking at his dream-self and being seen in turn by himself through the eyes of the dream.
Outside something happened, and the cosmic vagrant suddenly got up from his seat on the throne of long dead nothingness. He hears music... so familiar, but what is it? Old man rover stretches his arms, like christ on a cross, and just before the tidal waves of cosmic energy reduce him to cinder, he says something that only the one who was dreaming of him could possibly understand.
And he woke up. It wasn't much after he went back to bed, but he couldn't lay in bed any longer. His back ached something fierce, and so he made his way out of the room, and on to a dirty communal bathroom. The hot water brought some blood to his cheeks, and that made him feel oddly alive. The man proceeded with the rest of his morning affairs, and shortly thereafter he got out of the building, and out to a brand new day.
Of course, the days were always easy for him. Well. Easier at least. He'd do any number of things : by now he'd walked the streets of the city so many times that he proverbially knew them like the back of his hands. Sometime he'd walk into libraries and do nothing but look at books, hundreds and hundreds of them. Had he owned them at some time? Maybe even read them?
He did, during the day, whatever was necessary. Ofttimes he'd join those of his age in the park, and play cards, or checkers or chess. Whatever occupied his mind and time. He had little left of the former, and something inside told him that he would have plenty more of the former than he'd ever wish for. But the days were easier to cope with, at any rate, and just like any other day, this one ended like so many before. He stopped at the supermarket, checked his pockets for money, and saw that he could still afford some fruit. Some vegetables, even. Maybe.
In the kitchen he cooked a haphazard combination of leftovers and his shopping, ate it in silence, washed the dishes, went back to the room, and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling.
It was night.
Ah, night. The nights were always the hardest. For at night, it always came back to him. At night he always remembered.
And the thoughts swirled around inside his head, struggled with each other, but they all came flooding back. He so, so wanted to be able to just sleep, and drift into blissful forgetfulness... But alas. That is not how things go for him, now, are they?
So he embraced these thoughts, let them wash over him, let them carry him back to a time in the past. He says nothing. He wallows into this remembrance in a sacred, unspoken, unending way.
The voices, the faces, the cries and the sighs, the tears and the laughter : they all parade before him, and as they do, a solitary trickle streams down his eyes. Why fight it? It's always the same, every night. And somehow, he does feel that he's grown somewhat accustomed to it... To be sure, nothing in this provides him with any kind of closure, but at least this way... this way he can still see her face, and hear her voice, though it breaks his heart every single time.
He knows what happens next, he knows what will happen every night until he finally dies. A sort of smile crosses his lips when he remembers the dream he had the prior night. The old, old man repeated the same thing he has been saying every night for lo these many years.
He's just waiting for sleep and the wretched tiredness to claim him now. It's almost time, and when sleep comes... well, perchance to dream, then.
Eyes closed, and with a great, big heaving lament of grief and yearning, the man sighs ' Oh, Silvia...'
And then he sleeps.
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