Time passed slowly. He closed his eyes and let the darkness fill him up, he turned where he belonged, his inner self. There he was not disturbed, there no one spoke, there was a place he didn’t have to think. He felt the calmness inside, his whole body rested for a moment, he let himself swim in the peaceful, beautiful sea of relaxation. He felt the breeze on his face, he was flying. A small curve on his lips started to form for the first time that day. Then, a horn. He opened his eyes, blinked, not willing to step back to the real world. He saw the angry expression on the man’s face, who was in the car he was about the crash into. He didn’t say sorry, thinking that it would be kind but unnecessary, a word that would spoil the magic of the moment even further, would remind him of his existence, his boredom.
He passed the car. He pedaled faster as if he wanted to escape from, “Where?’, he thought for a moment. He realized that he didn’t have to try hard to escape, because the end was about to come, hopefully soon. He was tired, sweating under the hot summer sun, and his black tracksuit and his cap made him sweat even more. They were comfortable clothes though, and comfort was what he deserved after all the years he had to go through. True, he ‘had to go through’, because he didn’t choose it. That was the worst thing about his life; the fact that he didn’t choose to live it and the fact that every second he unwillingly passed here it was getting too late to change it to the way he would have chosen to live. The wheels of the bicycle turned faster and he felt his legs aching, he had to rest. Senility was the worst part of getting closer to the end of the coil. These days should have been the days that he should celebrate, the life was about to be over (he hoped), the mandatory mission was about to be completed. Still, his body was reacting the opposite way, he was not cheerful, not energetic enough, definitely not in the mode to celebrate. He tried to do as much as he could to avoid this feeling of helplessness against getting older, he was a sportsman first of all, and he was riding his bicycle every day, in the morning; to keep his body from getting old and wrinkled and fat like his wife’s body, no, not to escape from her and his house, or not that he didn’t have something better to do. He thought of his wife for a second and he didn’t wonder what she was doing because he knew. He knew that she would have washed the breakfast dishes by now and watched some silly morning shows on TV. Then she would have fallen asleep watching the food channel, on the couch that they bought twenty years ago, comfortably, in the arms of monotony, breathing the musty smell of the place they have called “home”. It was the smell that he hated, it made him feel as he was suffocating even when he thought of it. Lately he’s been wondering, what made his wife changed so much, what made them so different from each other, why that lively, beautiful woman have given up so easily to the call of humdrum? Everything was not that boring before; they used to have fun, going out everyday, laughing, enjoying every second of their lives instead of just watching it pass by… They were connected, there were no empty spaces in the moments when they were together, there was no silence when they talked. Thinking of the past, he hated ‘Life’ once again, that monster that took his wife and turned to something that he can’t know anymore, to someone dull, colorless, a living dead. Life made her someone who doesn’t feel helpless going deeper in the whirlpool or someone who simply doesn’t feel anything at all, breathing the rotten smell of their old house that would choke anyone who ‘really lived’. Panicked by the fear of that sense of choking he felt every morning he woke up from a pleasant dream to a real nightmare, he breathed the fresh air outside, filling his lungs completely with the smell of grass, trees and green.
That smell called him and he was led to the park unconsciously. Now that he was getting closer to the park, he laid on his legs a little stronger, encouraging himself that the rest under the trees was coming soon. He entered the park and stepped down from the bicycle, putting all his weight to his weary legs again, the weight of the bicycle on his arms and the weight of his life on his head. He went to the closest bench and sat down, his eyes half closed. He rubbed his eyes from time to time, as if he wanted to rub away his tiredness. He looked far away, so hard that his vision blurred. The voices faded. While everything around him vanished, some words stood clearly against the blur. “Go away” said someone, he thought. “Get away” said someone else. “Run!” they screamed suddenly, everyone around him. As always, he listened to what he was told. He stood up. As if he were moving in a fluid place, as if he was in a slow motion movie he took the bike. Leisurely he pedaled, enjoying each last moment of his old life that he was about to leave behind. Or maybe they were the first moments of his new life that had just begun. He was not quite sure where he was going; he just kept pedaling, getting faster and faster, to reach somewhere new, perhaps somewhere he had never seen before. In spite of his fast movement, time still passed slowly...
It was the moment when he saw the sign to his home when he started feeling exhausted again. “Do I really want to do this?” he thought. Though deep inside he knew, the appropriate question was different: “Can I really do this?”
He didn’t even stop for a moment. He didn’t waver. Maybe out of habit, he took a turn to the right, the direction pointed by the sign.
