< >	[ Beginning - End - Random - Notes - Email ]

2004-02-19 - 5:51 a.m. "I don't like tomorrow." Six-years-old, when everyone else detested spelling and little sisters, that was the answer he gave the teacher. When asked why there came a shrug of the shoulders and a simple "It doesn't taste as good as ice cream." The rest of the class laughed, but the teacher marked him down for the smart kid classes. "I don't like tomorrow." Sixteen-years-old, when everyone else abhorred break-ups and six-year-olds, that was what he told his girlfriend. "I don't like the idea that I'm growing up. I want to stay here, stay today exactly how I am, exactly how you are. I know that on the inside my mind will stay here, looking out as the tomorrow's go by, watching people age, while I will stay sixteen." She laughed, but he tried further to explain, "Right now, I am not attracted to thirty-year-old women, yet in two decades they are supposed to be my ideal. Perhaps that's why you hear all those stories of young women with old men. Perhaps that's why cheerleaders and schoolgirls are so popular. In their minds, all men are simply teenagers. To see someone you knew as a teenager grow up and get wrinkles and have children, it's disgusting to me." "I don't like tomorrow." Thirty-six years old, when everyone else loathed divorce settlements and sixteen-year-olds, that is what he told his dog. "Every night we go to sleep and our bodies are left empty. Every day life rushes back into our bodies in the morning, ready for another tomorrow. It's like we wake up, and we are born. We stumble around just getting used to this world, and then we grow old and die, laying down for another night's sleep. If you don't go to sleep at night you continue to grow wise, like that old man on the corner. But your body knows better. It knows you're past your time, and eventually we all must sleep and die. Sleeping pills are suicide, killing yourself before your time. Everyday is a lifetime, and every lifetime has something important in it. You can't die until that is fulfilled. And if you do, your ghost comes back and haunts you while you sleep. Did you ever wonder what dreams are? No of course not, you're a dog; you accomplish everything in your days, and never need to dream." "I don't like tomorrow." Eighty-six years old, when everyone else hated life and anyone younger than them, that is what he told his nurse. Lying in a bed with nothing to keep him company but his thoughts and the plump orderly, he thought of new philosophies. "What if this entire collection of tomorrows, this 86-year-old life of mine, what if it is simply one day in a bigger realm of my life. What if I go to sleep today and wake up tomorrow a new person? Everyone wakes up as a new person every normal tomorrow, but what if at the end we truly do? What if this 'death' is simply a time for sleep, in the larger span of my real life, and tomorrow I'll have to do it again?" This was his final thought before the coroner was called. He awoke the next day, thrust into a world of light and sound and movement. "I don't like today." Six-seconds-old and already getting slapped by someone four times his size. "Tomorrow I'll do it over again."

[ Who - Whom - Old - Host ] tomorrow (story 2)