Maybe Tomorrow

It was 6:58 on a perfectly ordinary Monday morning in September. I lay in bed in a dark room, having slept only in the small gaps between the ticks of the clock's hands. Nights like that had become far too familiar to me over the past few months.

My body was a heavy shell around my wandering thoughts as I stared at the cracks and ridges in the paint on the ceiling. In my mind they formed a map of an imaginary world. It was a place where I might have been a hero, or at least someone who woke up in the morning feeling rested. In the dark a person sees the most interesting things in the middle of nothing at all.

I closed my dry eyes and let my secret world fade out of my mind. Reality was coming at me fast, so I had to let go in good time of anything I couldn't take along with me. Constant sleeplessness had made my life foggy enough without daydreams on top of it.

When the clock turned to exactly seven, my alarm reminded me that it was time to get up and go be a productive member of society. My sigh turned into a yawn halfway through. Getting out of bed was a small battle every morning, one you lost and won at the same time.

I slapped reluctantly at my phone to shut off the sharp beeping and threw my blanket into a double fold beside me. I sat up on the edge of the bed in one stiff motion.

My room was still pitch black. Autumn had started taking over from summer. The chill in the air made me shiver.

I shuffled toward the bathroom next to the bedroom, flicking on lights along the way as I passed each switch. I squinted and kept my eyes as close to shut as I could, putting off the pain of the brightness a little longer.

I usually handled my morning routine by a set of habits that had taken shape gradually over the thirty-two years of my life. I always woke up at seven exactly, took a quick warm shower to wake up, dried myself off and put on the clothes I'd laid out the night before, brewed a cup of coffee, scrolled through the messages and notifications that had come in overnight, and left for the bus stop at 7:52 sharp. That was about eight minutes before my bus was due.

The morning routines I repeated day after day weren't a compulsion, more an automation produced by my hatred of early mornings. From the outside you probably couldn't tell the difference, but to me the difference was enormous.

If I'd lived with another person, they would probably have thought me pretty strange, with all my habits. Or maybe they'd have had habits just as strange, and we could have been strange together, which might even have been nice. I wasn't entirely sure, since I'd never lived with anyone.

Even though other people's habits interested me, I didn't really miss the company. The right partner might have changed that, but no suitable candidate had come along, and I hadn't gone looking.

My recent sleeplessness had only tightened the grip my routines had on my life. When the tiredness threatened to drown me, the routines were a kind of life ring. Then again, it was entirely possible that the routine nature of my life was exactly what had made the sleeplessness a part of my everyday, too.

I probably needed a change in my life, but I wasn't ready to do anything about it. Maybe I was afraid of breaking the everyday that was already only barely holding together, or maybe I was just useless. Probably both.

Maybe today would be the day everything changed. Or maybe tomorrow. Or maybe I'd never do anything about any of it. All three seemed about equally likely. It was a depressing thought. My inertia was starting to approach comic proportions.

A honk outside jolted me and made me realize that I had arrived at my bathroom door some time ago and had been staring at it as though I expected it to open on its own. That hadn't happened this time, so I had to open it myself.

Once I finally got into the bathroom I shut the door behind me and threw my night clothes into the laundry basket beside it. My skin was goosebumped with cold and rough against my palm, but at least the heated bathroom floor was a comfort to the soles of my feet.

I managed to resist the temptation to lie down on it and moved the limescale-spotted shower curtain aside just enough to slip past it into the shower. Despite my careful attempt, the curtain touched my leg anyway. Its clammy plastic clung unpleasantly to my skin and made my whole body flinch in disgust.

I shut my eyes and put my head all the way into the waterfall the shower made. The roar of it in my ears carried me for a few seconds into a world where I was safe from everything. There was no work, no bills, no worries. I needed that moment before I could start my day.

After the shower I got dressed. The night before I'd picked out black socks I'd been given last Christmas, a somewhat worn pair of dark blue underwear, a black T-shirt, black jeans and a dark gray sweater. I don't suppose I was an especially colorful person.

The warm shower had made this day feel a shade better. I wasn't entirely convinced yet, but the signs were promising. All in all I was in a fairly good mood. Maybe this day would turn out to be perfectly decent.

I wasn't a passionate coffee person by any means, but I liked one cup a day. On weekdays that cup usually landed in the morning, for the waking-up effect.

It wasn't about the taste. It was that I didn't like the wandering thoughts and anxious restlessness too much caffeine produced. One cup was the perfect amount: enough to wake me up, not enough to bring on an existential crisis. It's entirely possible that I was trying to control my life too much, whatever I told myself.

I put a filter in the machine, measured out the grounds and switched it on. Brewing one cup didn't take many minutes, so I didn't bother going anywhere.

While the coffee maker did its own magic, I had time to scroll through the notifications and news on my phone. As usual, a few ads had collected in my inbox. I didn't want them, but somehow it felt unbearably heavy to click the link that would have taken me off those companies' mailing lists. Maybe I'd do it tomorrow.

Then again, I also knew people who let pointless emails drift steadily down the stream without ever marking them as read. You could usually recognize them by the hundreds of unread messages sitting in their inbox. I couldn't have done the same, because my brain would have logged every one of them as an unfinished task, and my internal to-do list would have overflowed in no time.

On the news side there was nothing new or out of the ordinary. Politician A had done something they shouldn't have, and somewhere something unpleasant had happened because people were angry at each other for a reason that all parties involved had forgotten long ago. The world went on turning the way it always did.

The weather forecast, at least, offered a pleasant surprise. The rain and gray that came almost every day in the fall were promised a brief retreat: this afternoon the sun would shine and it would be warm. Something like a smile crossed my face, but a quick glance out the window wiped it off. It was raining. Of course it was raining.

"Rain, for a change," I said to my coffee maker, half out loud.

As if in answer, it clicked loudly to announce that the coffee was ready. I poured it into a mug and drank it too fast. I nearly burned my tongue, but I didn't care. I stood for a moment at the kitchen window and looked out at the gray morning waiting there. I listened to the ordinary sounds of the everyday, a neighbor's door thudding shut, the hum of traffic somewhere farther off. They sounded foreign to me. I had started drifting away from this world.

I set the empty mug on the counter and glanced at the clock. It was time to go.

I'd packed my work bag the night before. It was leaning now against the desk in the corner of the living room, upright and correct. There was an irritatingly hurry-up quality to it. It knew I was running slightly behind schedule.

I grabbed my light rainproof jacket off the hook in the hall and wrestled it on, twisting my arms around while I tried to get my shoes on without untying the laces and without using my hands. I could have used a shoehorn, but it had apparently wandered off on adventures of its own during the night, and I didn't have time to go looking for it now.

The end result was a crooked jacket and crumpled shoes, but it would have to do. I couldn't afford to stay and fix the situation if I wanted to catch my bus.

As a finishing touch I swung the bag off the floor and onto my back and checked that my wallet, phone and keys were in my pockets. I opened the door one-handed and burst out into the stairwell without waiting to see whether it closed properly behind me.

The lights in the stairwell buzzed on one after another as their motion sensors caught me hurtling past. Luckily there was nobody else in the hallway. That was normal, at least in our building, where people preferred to slip out one at a time, wary of the others and careful not to meet them.

The ground-floor lamp had been broken for several weeks and there was no sign of anyone coming to fix it. The darkness waiting outside had somehow managed to swallow the light in our lobby as well. The sight was frightening in some primitive way, which was why I always tried to get past the dark stretch as briskly as possible, at a half-run.

I checked my jacket zipper one last time as I pushed the front door open. The zipper moved a couple of millimeters upward and then slid straight back down to where it had started.

Outside there was barely any wind, but the cold drizzle and chill air still made me pick up my pace.

It was less than a couple of hundred meters from my place to the bus stop, and you could see the stop from the front door. Having a bus stop close by was a useful feature in an apartment, because it made getting around without a car possible. On the other hand it was also the cause of several missed buses, since the short distance brought with it certain illusions about how much time it took to cover.

Out in the yard I ran into the building's caretaker, who had been collecting leaves. He was lifting maple leaves into a black garbage bag with a wooden-handled rake.

"Morning! Off to work, is it?"

I raised a hand in greeting but didn't slow down.

"Morning! That's the one," I said, trying to sound polite.

Our caretaker must have been drinking better coffee than I was, because somehow he always managed to sound that cheerful and bright. I envied him secretly, but I wasn't ready to do anything about that either.

Just before the bus stop I dug my wireless earbuds out of my pocket. They let me listen to music and audiobooks on my commute, but also, when necessary, keep the excessively social at a certain distance. They were a wordless "Don't talk to me" sign.

I carefully opened the earbuds' smooth case and put them in. The familiar chime told me they'd found the phone in my pocket.

There was nobody else at the stop, which wasn't unusual for a stop this far from the center. All the same, the emptiness of it worried some corner of my mind today. It was as though everyone else knew something I didn't.

It didn't help that no one else showed up, however long I waited. The bus should have been here ages ago, so being late was starting to look more likely by the minute. The cold drizzle ran down my face and carried off the last shreds of hope with it.

The air smelled of wet asphalt and exhaust. The September cold pushed through my jacket and made me shiver. I would rather have been on a warm bus already, on my way to the next boring day at work.

"That damn bus better not have been early today," I muttered to myself, and glanced at the clock on my phone one more time.

I pulled up the transit app and checked the bus's position. On the map it was tearing away from me, the pixels jerking along mockingly. Somehow, in spite of everything, I had managed to be late.

"Of course," I said to the empty stop.

Luckily my bus ran about every fifteen minutes, so missing one wasn't a serious problem. It was still annoying.

I dropped onto the bench, fed up. The stop had a roof and small transparent walls. At least I was sheltered from the rain and the wind, if you wanted to find something good in the situation. The bench was cold and slightly damp.

I put on some Philip Glass and sat watching the maple leaves the wind carried past me. Minimalist piano and the calm drift of the leaves built a cinematic mood between them. It took the edge off my irritation.

There was something hypnotic in the way the leaves spun in the air. They let the wind carry them along and didn't care where they finally came to rest. Maybe there was a lesson in that, one only understood by the people who looked closely enough. Maybe they were just leaves.

In the end I got so lost in my thoughts that time lost its meaning. Other people had started trickling into the stop to wait for the bus. The world went on turning, even though I had stopped for a moment.

A young man arrived, staring at his phone so intently that he almost walked into the wall of the shelter. He dodged at the last second without even lifting his eyes from the screen. His thumbs moved across it at lightning speed. He was probably playing some game.

Next came two older women, talking to each other at an unnecessary volume. One of them wore a brown wool coat and carried a large bag that looked full of something heavy. Groceries, maybe, or books. The other smiled and nodded, but seemed to prefer listening to talking. From that I gathered she was probably a good friend.

Last to arrive was a young mother with a girl of about three. The girl bounced eagerly and tried to pull her mother toward the lamppost beside the stop, under which there was a small puddle. The mother held tightly to her child's hand and smiled tiredly.

"Not today, sweetheart. You'll get your shoes wet."

The girl didn't appear to agree, but she accepted her fate with a sulky glare.

Finally the bus appeared at the end of the street. It was an old wreck, the numbers on its display glowing dully.

I stood and took a couple of steps forward, closer to the curb. Following my example, the others waiting began to move and get ready. The old women broke off their conversation. The young man put his phone in his pocket. The mother picked up her daughter.

When the bus was almost at the stop, I noticed something was wrong. It was coming in far too fast. The driver slammed a hand on the horn to warn us. My first feeling was confusion: why wasn't the bus slowing down? Then I understood. It was trying to slow down, but the wheels were only sliding on wet asphalt paved with slick leaves.

One moment I was standing there in perfect peace waiting for the bus, the next I was in fear of my life. Time slowed, or at least it felt that way. Maybe my brain did what brains do when they realize this is the end: it gave me a moment, one single moment, to take it in.

I tried to move, to take a step back, but I was too slow. Far too slow.

Then came only pain, sudden, explosive, all-consuming pain. Every nerve ending in my body caught fire at once, and the world was nothing but white light and noise and chaos. Then, just as suddenly, nothing. No pain, no sound, no thoughts, only emptiness.

The darkness wasn't frightening after all. I had expected panic, terror, despair, but none of it came. The darkness was restful and its embrace almost a relief. I could no longer hear the patter of the rain or the drone of the bus engine. There were no obligations anymore, no routines, no dull mornings or lonely evenings. There was no more work that had never felt like it meant anything.

Who would have guessed I'd die on a Monday morning waiting for a bus. Not me, anyway. I had been braced for the routine grind to go on for decades yet.

Then, somewhere at the bottom of the depths, an infinite distance away, a faint blue light began to shine. At first it was barely visible, but then its glow started to strengthen fast. I felt something change, felt a pull, as if a rope had been wound around me. Then something yanked me toward the light.

My will no longer mattered. The light was calling me, and I answered. My consciousness vanished from this world.