I Chose Nothing

1

     The clock sat there upon the walls of John's studio apartment in Florida. He stared at the red hand as it ticked, counting every second. To him, that ticking was all he could hear, it was loud to him, distracting. The monitor of his computer emitted its blue light, a blank screen in front of him. On his own time, it was easy for him to write endless stories that went on and on about seemingly nothing, with a thick plot that made it all better. John could write, but now, now that he needs it, he simply could not.

     That clock stood there, antagonizing him, getting increasingly frustrated with himself, John turned off his monitor and pushed his rolling chair back with enough force to move him to the middle of his carpeted room. He needed to start and hopefully finish this paper before its deadline of four months, where it'll then be taken as half of his grade. The prompt was simple, yet impossible at the same time. 'What is something you live to regret?'

     Now for John, it was very difficult for him to pin point the exact thing that he regretted, he wanted his paper to mean something to him. He couldn't just write an entire article about regretting to take route 95 rather than Kirk road, or stopping at a Publix rather than Walmart. To him, those kinds of regrets were insignificant. So he sat there, looking up at his hideous popcorn ceiling and waited. Waited for an idea, a regret that he could write about. Sure he had time, however, the more time he had, the more emphasis he could put into his paper.

     Suddenly a large bang coming from the other side of the wall snapped John out of his thoughts. He jumped up, not expecting it. Due to the thin walls he heard a faint voice that laughed silently, he knew it was the neighbor. Due to him being in school, he never really conversed with them, but from what he could gather, they were either super clumsy, or always piling things up forming a tower, just to knock it all down.  But from what he got from the laughter, that sweet sounding laughter, it was clumsiness.

     Another bang came, and then another, at first the voice was screaming the words no over and over again, before the loud crashes came, in a fruitless attempt to stop it from falling. But after those crashes, a seemingly endless amount of laughter erupted. 'She must be insane.' John thought to himself as he put on a pair of sandals and headed towards his front door. 'She needs to tone it down.' He thought as he strutted out into the hallway and towards the door next to his. As he raised his fist up to knock, he froze in fear, catching himself. "What the hell am I even doing?" He muttered to himself. He collected himself and knocked, this wasn't a confrontation, he told himself, he was going to make sure they were okay just as a good neighbor should.