Ain't No Mountain High Enough

"Forever Young"

A few days later, I found a bill on the kitchen counter that hadn't been opened yet. Usually it was Keto that handled that stuff — of course, we all helped pay the rent and whatnot, but he just dealt with making sure bills got paid. Surprisingly, he was diligent about the job, and took it very seriously.

But what was this bill doing here? I opened it up and found it was the car payment...and it was late. I stared at it in surprise for a moment, then wheeled myself out to the living room. Veronica was playing a bloody looking game with zombies running all over the place, and was screaming orders into the headset she was wearing. She was probably playing with the weird group of gamers she met at school the other day.

"Hey, what's this all about?" I asked. I raised my voice, but she still didn't hear me. Rolling my eyes, I grabbed the remote and turned the TV down. "VERONICA!"

Veronica, a frightening lust for zombie blood in her eyes, turned her head to me. "WHAT?" she copied my tone.

I waved the bill. "WHAT IS THIS?" Okay, this yelling had to stop. I took a deep breath, then tried again. "Why is this late?"

"Hang on, guys," Veronica said into the headset. She paused the game, then got out of the pink bean bag she was sitting in and came over to take the bill from me. Her face went completely pale as she read it. "Oh..."

"'Oh' what?" I gripped the sides of my wheelchair.

"Keto was going to talk to you about that," she said, huffing a sigh and returning to her bean bag. Without further explanation, she returned to her zombie slaying.

I stared at her in confusion, then realized she took the bill with her and was sitting on it. I rolled my eyes again. Geez, this girl. How did she become my friend again?

I got curious, then rolled over to the front door and opened it. Veronica barely batted an eye, and I made my escape. Before, if I said I was going for a spin around the building, everyone would basically lose their minds and offer to push me around. Why could I never make it clear to them that this was a wheelchair, not a stroller!

Anyways, I shut the door back, then waited a moment to see if she would run after me. You're probably thinking, yo, you should have just bolted and let her realize you were gone. But no, I was weird like this. Maybe I just wanted the reassurance that she would notice I was gone really fast and come for me. I don't know.

After a minute or so passed and the front door wasn't yanked from it's hinges, I started down the sidewalk that circled the building. It was early November, and the trees had almost lost all of their leaves. The leaves were all the fall colors, though most of them were a dead brown color. When I could walk, I had a weird sense of satisfaction whenever I stepped on a dead, dry leaf and heard it crunch under my shoe. It was a little harder to do with a wheelchair, but I managed. Besides, there were some places on the sidewalk where the leaves were in heaps.

It was a cloudy day, and a particularly humid one. It was a little cold, and I was only wearing my favorite Metal Gear t-shirt, but most of the time sixty degree weather didn't bother me.

While I was leisurely rolling down the sidewalk, I came across an older guy that I knew lived a few doors down from us. He had a bad leg, and walked with a cane. I remembered once how I thought that must be horrible to live with. Now, I knew exactly how much I had taken walking for granted. Or being able to move your legs at all, really. At that moment, using a cane didn't seem so bad.

"Hello, Mr. Riggs," the man said. He stopped and leaned on his cane in front of me.

I scrambled to remember his name. "H-hi, Mr. Santos."

Mr. Santos smiled. "I see you're out for some fresh air?"

I couldn't help but smile back. "Yes, sir. It...helps me think better...being outside." I probably sounded like an idiot or something saying that, but it was kind of true. My head was constantly full of all kinds of crap those days, so it was nice to be able to think everything out.

Mr. Santos nodded in agreement. "But...aren't you a little cold?"

I laughed a little. "No, I...actually kind of like it."

Mr. Santos tapped at the sleeve of his black sweater. "Not me. It makes my bones ache." He laughed. "Well, you're still young. How are you feeling, anyway?"

The truth almost spilled out, then. I almost said how tired I was. Tired of everything. I barely held it back and let out a quiet "fine". You know, the same answer everyone gives even if it's a blatant lie.

If Mr. Santos could see right through me, he didn't show it. He simply nodded again, slowly, like he was contemplating. Then, "Would you mind if I walked with you for a moment?"

I paused. We weren't exactly close friends. We just said hi to each other if we happened to even see each other, which was a lot more often now that I dropped out of my fall semester and quit my job. Hm...maybe we were getting to be friends. "I don't mind."

He limped along beside me as I slowly pushed my wheels to match his pace. Silence hung in the air for a long moment, with only the wind to distract from how awkward I started to feel. Finally, after we were halfway around the sidewalk, he said something.

"How old are you, Randall?"

I furrowed my brow. "Um...twenty-one?"

"You've got a lot of years ahead of you." He was staring ahead of us with a look of complete certainty on his face. "Lots of years."

"The doctor said that depends on what my body does as time goes on," I said. I had never actually thought about when Doctor Phillips had told me as much. That sometimes being paraplegic shortens your lifespan.

"No need to look at it from that perspective," he said. "You could spend your entire life worrying that you will die early, and then you end up living a long time. And you lived that entire time worrying."

I pressed my mouth into a thin line. I had heard of people who were constantly worried sick about getting a disease, or having a heart attack or whatever since it was in their genes, but they ended up only wasting time worrying since what they were so worried about never actually happened.

But then again...what if I did live a long time? I couldn't imagine being in a wheelchair for that long. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt panic begin to rise in my chest.

The average human lifespan is around seventy-five years or so, and I was twenty-one. Say I ended up living until I was seventy-five. That means that I would have spent fifty-four years — nineteen thousand seven hundred and ten days — in a wheelchair.

Suddenly, living a full life seemed more terrifying than dying early.

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Peace ✌ ~ A.J.