Short Weird Tales: Awake

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

I lie awake again, unsure what time it is since I don't want to put the light on, for fear I won't be able to get back to sleep. Darkness doesn't stop irony. It's probably somewhere between one and four, since it's completely dark outside, and I've been asleep before now. Taunting me in the gloom is the sound of my clock. The reminder that the rest of the world is carrying on outside the window, even in the dark.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

A second seemed like so much longer when I was a child. I'd been taught that the best way to accurately count time at that level was to say aloud "one, one-thousand, two, one-thousand, three, one-thousand…". It seemed easy then, and if anything I probably did it too quickly to be anywhere near precise. Nowadays I can barely get the words out before the next strike of the thinnest hand cuts me off mid-flow. Mathematically, a second was a much larger percentage of my life-so-far at that age, so maybe that's it. Or perhaps on some psychological level I just want a second to be longer than it actually is. It's all the same in the end. When time stops.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

There will be a point, at some time in the future, where the gap between the tick and the tock signifies the end of my life. Between the tick and the tock of a particular untold number, I will cease to be. The spark of life will be extinguished. Everything I carry in my mind will be lost. A drop in an immeasurable ocean. No matter how sudden or protracted my death, at one time I'll be alive and at one I won't. A single switch flipped (or fuse blown), in a field of near-infinite light. And in the grand scheme of things, that moment is already defined; a cell in a metaphorical spreadsheet. It could be an hour from now, or a year, or ten years; It barely matters, since I can't know which. The knowledge that no-one living has this time-signature does nothing to stop me thinking about the fact that it exists.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

A clock is counting down for me; a by-product of a cause-and-effect universe where age, disease and sheer probability are all accounted for, and the close of my life is documented as surely as the outcome at the end of a favourite book, and just as immutable. We don't know the end of our story any more than Winston Churchill or Tony Montana did, and the thought that it's already committed to history as sure as theirs is little comfort.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.

All we can do is seize the moment. I don't know how many moments you've tried to seize at 2am, but there's really very little you can do. We're programmed to work in daylight hours, at precisely the same time as all the other frantic, greedy, lying, venal humans are also trying to grab their destiny. It's a book that makes for solemn reading, and the deeper the volume becomes, the less inclined you are to finish. All we can do it plough on, oblivious to everyone around us flailing for exactly the same thing, albeit subconsciously: a way to be remembered. That final clack of the clock's second-hand is dealt equally, no matter how virtuous we claim to be. The rain falls on the just and the unjust, alike.

Tick, tock, tick.

Don't think about the timer, the countdown, the measure of a life worth living.
But don't you dare forget it.

Tock.

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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
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