Speaking to the Atmosphere

8th April 2508

It was dark now. The sky had faded into an intensely inky shade of plush violet; the dappled lilac canvas had been pushed away so that the night could set in. The wind soared both low and high, carrying icy tendrils of chilling cold that settled as frost on the rooftops, on the surfaces of lakes and ponds and on the windowpanes of almost all of the houses that it passed by. Trees rustled loudly, their remaining leaves detaching from their fragile branches and floating along with the wind until they hit the floor below, with an ease that reminded Gerard so much of autumn.

He sat on the same hilltop as he did the day before, the one with the clear view over the hilltops and into the sunset beyond. Now, however, the sunset had long since departed from its resting place atop those hills, leaving an empty void of sky in its wake. As Gerard leant against the tree with the bark that jutted out and into the back, he realised just how much he loved to watch the sun go down. He had missed it on that day and was left feeling disappointed, empty almost.

In fact, he was already pretty empty. The taste of stomach acid and vomit was still pungent on the tip of his tongue, which only reminded him of what he was trying to escape from entirely. After he had puked up all of his theories along with the contents of his stomach, he had stood up, met with the head rush of changing altitude, only to heave again. There was nothing left. His stomach was empty, his brain was empty, both of their previous contents flushed away through the porcelain U-bend and lost down in the sewers below.

As the bile, vomit and confusion-ridden thoughts were sent spinning downwards, Gerard had watched, and couldn’t help but think that they had taken a part of him with them. No doubt, his stomach had felt empty. Although, he hadn’t counted on his thought processes coming in slow and labored, as if everything but the memories stored in his head had been flushed away with the stagnant water and acid-riddled vomit, leaving him a shell that could feel no emotion aside from remorse for his lost thoughts.

Gerard had stumbled from the bathroom, from the house altogether. He did feel empty, he was sure. He felt marginally alive, not weighed down with heavy organs or muscles as he walked. It felt as though his skin and veins and arteries were the only things that were keeping his weightless form grounded as his heart, lungs and stomach all burst into helium filled particles that couldn’t wait to escape, and fly him up to the sky. He envisioned that the sky would welcome him with open arms, wrapping him up in its airy embrace before he could float straight up and through and into space beyond. It was only these thoughts, filled with fantasies that occupied his uninhabited brain as he merely floated along with the harsh wind until it had dropped him off at the hilltop.

He couldn’t say that he needed to clear his head, because he certainly couldn’t make it any clearer. He just needed to get away, away from his apartment and out into the air. If anything, he needed a place to think, to subconsciously will the deep thoughts back into his head after he’d unceremoniously deposited them in the toilet bowl. He needed a place where he could quarantine himself from everything and, what better place to go to than up there? On the hilltop, the air was fine and breezy and his ears weren’t assaulted quite so harshly by the wind. He needed a secluded place to isolate himself away from the world and all its nasty habits.

He watched as a leaf flitted down gently from the same tree that he was sat under, wondering, why? The trees, the frost, the sheer autumnal quality of the weather and its doings were, once again, putting him on edge. No longer did he associate autumn with the bright yellow-orange-red hues of the leaves that severed themselves from their branches and settled in the carpet of colours on the ground. No, now autumn was about the pale lilac-white, almost anemic looking leaves settling like crackling snow on the ground, the colours of autumn had long since disappeared; the fierce and fiery shades had been lost in the throws of white-lilac and purple.

So, why? Why were the leaves detaching themselves from their homes to settle on the floor in early April? April, as far as Gerard knew, was a spring month. In spring, the trees grew full and big for the summer, bulbs and buds expanded into lucid plants or flowers that people took pride in, showing them off to their neighbors. If they were to do that this year however, they would be sorely disappointed, as Gerard predicted, some of them were. They watched as their precious buds failed to bloom, dragged down by the frost which settled on their stems and the buds themselves, coating them in a layer of unbreakable ice which froze their growth, forever. Another thing on the long list of things that could never have a life.

Gerard felt sick at the thought.

He felt selflessly selfish, and so he was contradicting himself. So many living things didn’t have the chance to bloom and blossom and live a life, and yet, here Gerard was; still going (not so) strong after nearly 520 years of gracing the earth. He couldn’t help but feel automatically selfish; there were plenty of miscarried children that would have benefited from living a life. He hated the fact that he was still alive, after five centuries, when there were people, plants, animals that never got to live for even a day. Why wasn’t he dead by now?

Mostly, through all the self-pity and self-loathing, he couldn’t help but think of him (Gerard wasn’t quite ready enough to even think his name). A life that had been lost, abandoned, at such an early stage in life. Sixteen years old. That’s all he was, a teenager with a life filled to the brim with fantastic opportunities layed out ahead of him. He, had been everything to Gerard, his world, his universe; all the clichés in the entire universe had applied in their case. They had kept each other grounded, safe, sane, in a world so full of madness and turmoil, their relationship was the safety net made of cozy cotton fibers and delicate downy hair, laced with burning adoration and earnest love, which had kept their private world safe. It was somewhere to fall into when times got tough.

They had been each other’s reason for existence. Now, Gerard’s only reason for existence was the fact that he couldn’t get out.

Gerard idly flicked his black locks from where they rested on his eyes, obscuring his hazed vision. He could quite clearly make out the dazed lilac moon in the sky; its luminescent radiance swept down from the heavens and lit up everything in its path. The pale violet light emitting from the glowing orb tinged the sky a lighter shade of blue-violet where the moon sat, and the light looked like some kind of a halo. Gerard stared in wonder; he had never really studied the moon before, the sun had taken up the most part of his brain and he didn’t know why. The sky amazed him, it always had, even before the upper zenith had been bleached a violent shade of purple. It was an artist thing, the way the colours bled and swam into each other made his head spin, and whenever something was troubling him, he would always look up at the sky for solace.

The sky was something that took his mind off of things, but turned those things into other deep and troublesome thoughts. Like at that moment, Gerard sat, with his head leant back against the spiky trunk of the tree, looking up at the scarves and playing redundantly with the scarf in his fingers. He was watching the blue-violet clouds as they moved and yet somehow managed to look camouflaged against the sky. They were weakly tinged with grey around their edges and Gerard wondered cautiously if it was going to rain while he was sat out there, and as he had no urge to go back home, whether he would get caught in the downpour.

The thought of rain and April the 8th brought him back to that year. That year. The first three months of 2008 had been dull, normal. With the Global Warming scare all over the headlines, half of the Earth’s population had gone mad with worry, disbelief, while the other half remained ignorant and selfish and continued to pump out car and factory fumes like the world wasn’t said to be ending.

Gerard remembered that, five hundred years ago (to the very day), it had rained. Short and hot April showers were normal, and, Gerard remembered that he always hated the fact that it would most likely be raining on his birthday. The rain seemed to make his hair dull and lank, his skin blotchy and lacking in colour. The fat drops also seemed to pull some of the colour from Gerard’s eyes, the rich brown-green turned drab and shallow by the falling rain. Gerard knew that it inevitably had to rain. As long as there were seas, oceans, rivers and lakes, there was always going to be rain, it was all part of the water cycle after all. If there was sun shining, evaporating oceans into water vapor that then cooled and fed the clouds, then rain and hail and snow was always going to fall down and grace the earth; it was just something that had to happen.

Gerard just didn’t like watching the sparkle from everybody’s eyes leave with the vapors.

Gerard had always loved the sun; there was no doubt about it. His love for the sun was the main reason why most of his drawings consisted of splashes of colour which formed massive and circular shapes which represented the fiery object. The sun, in most cases, brought hope and happiness to the world. Its soft yet strong flashes of warmth and light spread over the sleepy earth like a blanket, coating it and lulling it back into life after winter. When the sun was out, birds would chirp and set off in flight, merely basking in the glow, happy as can be. It wasn’t only animals that seemed to rejoice when the sun showed its face, human beings would go outside, partake in activities that they couldn’t do while the rain, snow and hail were passing through. And Gerard smiled as he noticed that glimmer of delight return to everyone’s eyes.

The love that Gerard had for the sky always came second to the love that Gerard had had, still had, for him.

Gerard closed his eyes against the wind, against the agitated sigh that had just left his lips. It wasn’t that often that his mind wondered back to thoughts of the life that he had once lived, of the life that he could have lived (although thoughts about this were becoming increasingly frequent of late), if it wasn’t for the disaster; that crippling tragedy that had occurred 189,929 days prior. Gerard couldn’t say that he hadn’t been keeping a mental note of every day that went by without him, without feeling whole, or fulfilled. Gerard had long since lost that bubbling flicker of hope that was so bright in his eyes. His faith had been lost, buried under layer after layer of apologies concerning losses, until the forced optimism and faith and hope was crushed beyond repair.

And Gerard had been frustrated beyond belief with himself because he had always been told by that person to keep the faith. That request had been shot down in flames long ago.

How could he though, how could he keep that faith? Gerard believed that he didn’t deserve to live blessed with eternal happiness, he didn’t deserve it because there was no one by his side to experience it with him. He figured that if he had no one to share this happiness with, then there was no point in even trying to cling onto what little hope he had left, and so, he let it go. And he watched it die right before his very, empty eyes.

It was nearly two months after the search for the missing entity in Gerard’s entire existence was abandoned that he finally broke down and decided to end it all. No traces were found and the police had given up, taking Gerard down with them. They had searched high and low for six painstakingly long months, almost half heartedly because of the big stir caused by the ‘Earth-saving layer’, and with scientists and journalists propelling themselves up into space left, right and centre, their search was even more labored. He had sat alone, biting his nails with his legs tucked securely underneath him, a million and one haphazardly formed thoughts passing through his fevered brain. Scenarios filled up his head until smoke clouded his vision and caused him to pass out for days on end, only to awake with silence concerning the search, but in this instance, no news was bad news. Gerard remembered; it was his brother’s birthday when the news about the layer flew in, the layer that bleached the sky violet and caused silver linings to materialize on the clouds. They abandoned the search, not because there was no evidence (although, there was no evidence, but there was something more to it); they abandoned it because everyone was happy; Gerard wasn’t.

Two months, he lasted, barely, for two months before it was time for him to end it all. He walked off a bridge, leaving no sorry’s, no goodbyes, and no regrets behind him. His brother had been livid, bursting with an intense mixture of anger and sympathy at his actions. Why on my birthday Gerard? He had asked him, leaning over his hospital bed, careful not to dislodge any of the tubes that his brother was hooked up to. He had tears in his eyes, and held onto Gerard’s bandaged hand as he watched him struggle to speak; he had broken his jaw when he had landed and so speaking was almost impossible.

September 10th 2008, Gerard had been submitted to hospital after jumping off the old bridge above the river. It had been dark, and he had somehow managed to land on the bank on the left hand side of the river. He had been pretty bloodied up, 114 of his 206 bones broken, including his nose, jaw, both of his legs, his right arm, left wrist and his pelvis, as well as damages to his muscles and fractures to his skull.

The doctors had said that he was so incredibly lucky to be alive; Gerard however, didn’t believe himself to be so lucky. He was alive, and as long as he was alive, he would have to live with the guilt that he had given up, the guilt of wanting to leave his family and friends behind when they had already experienced so much loss in the months prior to his failed suicide attempt. He was left with emptiness, hopelessness and the loneliness, the loneliness of knowing that he had so many people around him, willing to help and care for him, but only wanting the one person that he could no longer have.

But that was the trivial thing; no one had ever declared his world dead, only missing, the search abandoned, and these thoughts, thoughts that came to him while he was lying paralyzed on a hospital bed, had returned a very small percentage of that hopeful glimmer back into him. He couldn’t help but wonder, What if he’s still out there? But then, he’d wonder why he ever left in the first place, and Gerard didn’t want to deal with the feelings of betrayal and abandonment that would no doubt come hand in hand with such thoughts.

To this day, Gerard still wondered what life would be like, would’ve been like if none of this had happened. He knew, for definite that he wouldn’t be sat; leaning against an old tree that gave him splinters in his back, watching the pinpricks of stars appear on a purple sky. He knew that, in whatever world he may be in, that he would not be living alone; he would be surrounded by all of his family and friends, anyone who cared, and he would be sat right by Gerard’s side.

The thing was, life wasn’t like that. Gerard couldn’t go back in time, but he knew, that if he could, he would do it, and try to stop the past from ever morphing into what it was now.

After that day, 520 years ago, Gerard realised that things were never going to be alright. He figured that that was the reason that he had tried to commit suicide (on more than one occasion), because life was never going to be the same, for anyone in the world. Things changed rapidly, human beings were taking advantage of being alive. After the announcement of No more Global Warming, recycling had gone to the dogs and no one bothered to monitor how much carbon was being emitted up into the atmosphere; people just didn’t care anymore.

Gerard did; surely it was all too good to be true. Some nights, the nights when he could actually sleep, he woke up expecting everything to be back to the way things were, wanting things to be back to the way things once were. Despite the protective layer being too good to be true, Gerard, selfishly, would have rather have been living on a condemned planet with his partner, than in a bustling and alive world where nothing he once knew existed any longer. Gerard didn’t feel alive; he had felt so dead for a long time after his twentieth birthday, in a way, he had died on that day, and that was what had inevitably driven him to suicide for the second and third time.

He was completely and utterly messed up, for lack of a better term. It was nearly Christmas in the year 2038; Gerard was alone, secluding himself from the world. He felt like a freak show; he couldn’t get a job, people didn’t take him seriously and so they turned him away. You most definitely are not 50 years old, Mr. Way. They would all say the same thing, disregarding his pleas and anything else he had to say, before they kindly and patronizingly asked him to leave their office like he was some insecure head case.

Gerard may have felt 50 years old, but he didn’t look it.

Gerard’s body had been frozen, standing stock still in time while his mind transformed and molded around experiences and new environments. His youthful features, soft skin and still-bright eyes didn’t do him any favors when explaining the age on his birth certificate (April 9th 1988, yes you did read that correctly), and those aspects of his physical appearance did not compliment what was on the inside. His brain had been worn down, shaped around so many different thoughts and feelings and contrasting emotions. The nerve endings in his brain were frayed, unable to connect to anything else within his head. His movements became zombie-like; he could hardly move and when he did, his muscles ached and he felt like his bones had been cracked out of place.

Mikey was the only person he could turn to, and so he did just that. That Christmas was the worst, Gerard couldn’t get out of bed, no hospital would have him because they deemed his date of birth a joke, and his parents were facing their own problems concerning their forthcoming divorce. The only movement that Gerard could make was that of his eyelids and his jaw, and even then, his vocal chords would tighten and make it hard for him to speak. Throughout the whole ordeal, he was solely convinced that he was dying. When he voiced this to his brother, Mikey’s body would go stiff, before he dismissed Gerard’s words with a quiet don’t be stupid Gerard.

It was hard on Gerard’s brother as well as him. Mikey had just passed his 47th birthday and had other commitments as well as tending to his brother. His daughter would be leaving for university in a matter of months and Mikey needed to fork out some money so that she could go, even though his job was rapidly letting him down, money-wise. Despite all of this, he had never complained when looking after Gerard. Long ago was the time when they established that Gerard wasn’t aging and they all just learned to live with it. No doctors could distinguish why; they merely stated that it was a mutation of cells inside his blood stream which were stopping the growth of his body. Now, Gerard’s brain was dying, as well as his body, and he was growing weaker by the second and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

Well, there was one thing. That one thing, in the end, was the thing that was carried out. It was in February 2039 that Mikey agreed to help Gerard. Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, an illegality that was their last ever resort. Mikey had gathered a needle, pumped full of oxygen. Gerard had closed his heavy eyelids against the sight of the sharp and sterile silver metal as it pierced his skin, and pushed into his vein. Mikey winced as he pushed the pump down, injecting the deathly dose of oxygen into the blood stream of his dying brother. Gerard had heard small popping noises as the usually harmless gas had mixed with his blood. His eyes were closed, but incandescent and colourful lights were assaulting his vision and hurting his aching retinas, the smell of sulfur charging up and down his nose and throat. A million and one images of skies and fields and other special places flew through his mind, each one bending in on itself and flashing in every shade of the colour spectrum imaginable. It hurt, it hurt his eyes and his brain but he couldn’t find the energy to cry out.

When he opened his eyes again, his vision was clear and he could smell something clinical. No longer were his ears being violated by that popping noise and he could feel his muscles and limbs. Not only that, but he felt alive, his brain felt alive as well as his body. Gerard had been born again that day and Mikey had been overjoyed. Gerard however, hadn’t been too pleased. This only confirmed his suspicions about the fact that he couldn’t die, and possibilities concerning many more years of loneliness arose within his mind.

Gerard may have been alive, but that really didn’t mean that he was happy.

Gerard still wasn’t happy. He hated watching the world go by and seeing the countless smiling faces breezing past him as if nothing was wrong. Gerard had to admit that life as a whole was more depressing back before the layer’s existence. His life wasn’t bad before it happened; it had been quite the opposite. Gerard was the only one who could compare life before and after the year 2008, because as far as he knew, he was the only human being to have lived for 520 years. He was the only one who could compare, but it was his own opinion that made it invalid. Life, as a whole race, was worse off before the layer came into action because the world was dying, slowly being wiped out by toxic gases and rising sea levels. In 2508 however, life for the human race couldn’t be better. Although there was still political governments running each country, world peace seemed to have been achieved. There hadn’t been a war for at least four centuries and poverty seemed to have been abolished.

Gerard had found this ironic, and snorted at the thought, a small portion of fresh night air filling up his lungs as he did so. How could a mere fabrication pulled over the planet Earth cause everyone to be nice and civil to each other? Before, there had been countless problems in the world, and even trivial things seemed to have changed in the grand scheme of things. On average, a human being could most likely expect to live until the age of 100, obviously if they had lived a healthy life away from drugs and other injurious indulgences. Even the rate of drug taking and binge drinking had gone down significantly. There were countless problems that the world had once faced that were just fading out of existence. The rate of teenage pregnancy, infant mortality, murder and other crime had significantly diminished in the recent years. The atmosphere on Earth was like a positive drug. People breathed it in and it instantly went to their heads, altering their train of thought and settling in their gut until it became apparent that it was then needed. The purple glow had made people kinder, generations and generations of crime-committers had been cut out, skipped until there was no need for them to return.

The world had gone mad, and Gerard didn’t like it one little bit.

Mikey, in the end, had lived until he was 93. Gerard had been living half way across the country when it happened, trying desperately to find someone who was willing to edit his birth certificate. But, as he had suspected, he never managed to find anyone; people didn’t commit forgery or whatever it was classed as anymore. It was then that Gerard had noticed that the world had changed beyond recognition. Mikey’s grandson Ryder, had managed to contact him, somehow. Gerard had felt so unexplainable, shocked or upset didn’t even cover it one tiny fraction. He had tried so hard not to break down, but the thought of his beloved brother not walking the earth, even in his old age, anymore made him shake, and these tremors shook him beyond the very core of his bones and into every atom that made up his existence.

He had traveled back to attend the funeral, which was certainly a sad state of affairs for everyone that attended. Loose family members that Gerard didn’t even know arrived one after another, and he had met so many of his brother’s great grandchildren to the point where he couldn’t remember any of their names or which one of Mikey’s children they had descended from. Gerard had to introduce himself as a mere ‘family friend’ to all of the other mourners because they wouldn’t believe him if he had told them that he was Mikey’s brother.

Gerard’s family tree had to be so messed up; Mikey’s branch stemmed and grew out, causing other families to latch onto it as it went further down the line, while Gerard’s branch abruptly stopped. Gerard had mulled over this at the wake; what would have happened if he’d have married a nice girl in this ‘brand new world’? Would he have had children and forgotten all about his first love completely? Would his branch be even bigger than Mikey’s? Would he have married countless times and had even more children because of his inability to die?

Or would he have been able to die, after living happily, and therefore dying happily?

So many questions that would be left unanswered, because no matter how hard Gerard was capable of trying to build up another life for himself, he knew that his heart would never truly be in it. He was constantly going to be living and thinking of his life in the past for as long as he was going to live, as long as that may be. Gerard couldn’t risk feeling the guilt of leading a pleasant soul on for their whole life only so that he could finally let go of the past. He would be betraying himself, that other person and most importantly, him. And Gerard didn’t want to even think about partaking in anything close to betrayal. Betrayal was the worst sin in his mind and he didn’t want to suffer for it later, he preferred to keep a low profile.

After all these thoughts, his brain had started lagging, much like it had done at Christmas that year, and Gerard snapped the chord that connected his mind and those thoughts, preferring to think that if he didn’t think those kind of things or feel those kinds of feelings, then he could keep his brain alive. Gerard was sure that as he sat with all of Mikey’s descendants, his own funeral should have happened years ago, if not longer. After all, he was a 101 year old in a 20 year olds body; something was wrong there. Gerard’s mind was getting more fragile even by the day and he feared that one day, it was all going to build up and explode inside his head.

He had managed to make some friends at Mikey’s funeral, only because he wanted regular updates on what was happening with his own family and so he could keep track of himself. If he lost all contact with his roots then he would most likely lose his own identity and any sense of a family that he had left. His parents had died about 40 years before Mikey, and he had lost contact with his cousins; he didn’t even know which ones were alive and which ones weren’t, and that irked him somewhat. That was what drove him to stay in contact with these new acquaintances that were family disguised as friends.

It was in the summer of the year 2256, and Gerard was now 268 years into the mix. He had been forgotten, the friends he had made at the funeral were long since dead and he really did have nothing to live for. This thought, the secluded strand of inevitable loneliness had kept finding its way back into his troubled mind and he truly had lost all prospect of hope or faith. Every year since the year 2009, on the 9th of April (a day made special by a number of different reasons) he would walk with a head full of optimistic thoughts and long, purposeful strides to the place where they last saw each. It was there that they shared their last exchange of words, the last kiss and the last ever goodbye. That place, at which they had arranged to meet on Gerard’s 20th birthday tugged at Gerard’s heart for days before the day that marked another year, and he couldn’t ignore that tug for all he was worth.

240 years and nothing ever changed. He had stood at that corner 240 times and nothing had happened. Every single time he would wait for hours, and his high and hopeful spirits would fade that little bit more into nothing as every hour passed and this year, he had had enough of waiting for something that he was sure was not going to happen. This realisation was the push that led him to his third and last ever suicide attempt. He couldn’t physically or mentally take living, if that was what it was called, with no one to turn to, no one to talk to even. He was merely a shell and he wanted out, for good.

It was a fairly pleasant, regular summer morning when Gerard’s landlord decided to check his apartment, as the rent hadn’t been paid in a number of weeks, only to find Gerard’s lifeless body hanging from a pipe connected to the ceiling. The landlord had screamed, finding the courage to search through the clutter to find any traces of a telephone. He called the police (no point calling an ambulance, the body had been cold for a long time), and they had taken about a month trying to find anything that gave any evidence that Gerard had been murdered, and as there were none, they had had to cut the body down. As soon as Gerard’s airways had been cleared, away from the restricting rope that was cutting so deep into his neck, his eyes had opened and blinked in the warm summer light that was far too bright for his lazy retinas. He took several massive gulps of air and let the oxygen fill up his lungs before realizing that, once again, his attempt had failed. The police officers had been far too stunned to stop Gerard as he ran out of the apartment, and away from the crime scene with what little belongings he had managed to scoop up as he ran out of his house and fled, moving to another part of the state until he deemed it safe enough to go back

When he did go back, it was 120 years later, and still nothing had dramatically changed.

He was 388 years old and after his last suicide attempt he had felt more awake, not necessarily alive, but his brain and body felt more alert. It was as if every time he thought about the past, his brain would die slowly, and he would feel suicidal. When he finally did commit suicide, it was like he was renewing himself in some way; his ‘death’ was just a recharging of batteries that he needed to do once in a while so he could keep on living. But the thing was, he didn’t want to keep on living. It was a vicious circle.

For the next 132 years, Gerard learnt not to tap into the past, or relive any of his memories in his mind. He decided to go back to one of his old passions; art. He filled his time with drawing, painting and just observing the world for what it now was and learning to accept that. He had gathered by past experiences that he really wasn’t going to be able to die any time soon, as the more worked up he go when he decided to kill himself, the more alert and awake he came out as at the other side. Every year, he still went to that same spot out of habit and wasn’t disheartened when the same thing happened each time; nothing

That was when it came to him, he was thinking all of this over – he was thinking about his past and he wasn’t feeling suicidal or sad or psychotic at all. Gerard had always been sure that on the 500th year of waiting, something good would come out of it, it was just based on the connotations of the number 5; it was a solid number and had an entirely good feel about it. Gerard’s suspicions were becoming more and more realistic by the second at he sat on the hilltop and thought all of this through; this was the year that something was going to change. Gerard had been trapped in these thoughts for a long time, and the wind was whipping at his body from all directions. The sun had set hours ago and he stared with blank eyes until a faint blush of lilac had stained the dark canvas of sky, seeping and spreading up from the horizon like paint on silk.

It was then that he snapped out of his daze.

He had been sat there all night long. It was now dawn; the sun was rising and it was a new day.

It was April the 9th once again.

And today, was the day.