A Year Of Hope

If you chose to continue reading,

let me now introduce myself.

My name was Mordecai Evens, but I also don't mind if you refer to me as Cai.

I wasn't really interesting. I was just an insignificant person in this insignificant town. I almost felt like being insignificant in an insignificant town, was worse than being insignificant in a significant city; it doubles your insignificance.

My past isn't all that important. Just an unloved kid who's parents were cold as ice, but they gave me the bare necessities and let me do whatever I want just so I'd leave them alone. I had some friends, sure, but we were all adults now, who went our separate ways and started lives of our own.

Well they started their lives. I hardly had a life to live. I was a chain smoking, college drop out, who had no friends or lover, and worked at a music store at the mall. 

Completing simple tasks like getting out of bed, getting dressed, or cleaning up my apartment felt monumental. Even talking was hard. Every time I spoke, my words came out delayed and slow. I didn't have a very colorful personality to begin with, but my sadness made me even more gray.

It also made it hard for me to fall asleep. I'd stay up at night with my thoughts buzzing through my head. When my mind finally did allow me to sleep, I would have nightmares that would wake me up and keep me awake the rest of the night. I was lucky if I was able to get 5 hours of sleep a night.

Life just became exhausting, and I had the bags under my eyes to prove it. I had to drink two energy drinks just to get through the day.

I don't really know what caused me to become so bleak. Maybe it was loneliness. I wasn't the best at making friends on account of my ordinariness. Maybe it was the fact that I was such a failure, I even had to drop out of college. I was also rather shy, so that surely didn't help.

Or maybe I was never happy to begin with. Maybe I had been unhappy all my life. It certainly felt this way. I couldn't remember what happiness felt like at this point, or if I had even felt it.

I began planning for May 19th, the day before my 22nd birthday, to be my last day on Earth. I had made sure to take the next week off work, so as to not raise any alarms with a sudden resignation. I planned every detail out carefully as to how I would die.

On the day of the 19th, I believe it was a Saturday, I took a walk around my insignificant town as I smoked what I thought would be my last cigarette. My town was quite ordinary, not unlike me, but it was also lively, homely, and inviting, which was very much unlike myself. I believed this would be the last walk of my life, and I wanted to take in the simplistic, underrated beauty of my town.

And then she hit me.