Art by Mori_art_ti

Challenge: Baked good

Idea by @minipage

"One Last Moment"

minipage

Knowledge isn't necessarily power.

We all feel so determined to know everything. We want to know why we exist. We want to know how small an atom is. We want to know why Timmy broke up with Jessica's ex-best friend, Mary's sister's cousin because OMG that is so important.

We want to know when we'll die.

If you did know, what would you do? 

Would you try to live better? Would you make sure you said your goodbyes? Would you make sure you got your revenge?

Knowledge is power, in that it comes with a great deal of responsibility.

With my new found knowledge, I took my life into my hands and decided to tell no one that I was dying.

I wanted to continue my life without any interruptions. I wanted to forget my date.

Besides, two to three months isn't a date. It's a range. I didn't want to spend a month waiting to die.

As soon as I found out, I was angry. I spent a night in a rage of screams and tears.

The next morning, I pushed through a headache to book a ticket to India. I had never been but it seemed like an exciting place to be to forget everything. 

Then I bought three more.

I put a post out on Facebook first, offering the tickets to any companion who could take the time off work.

There was a couple of bewildered responses, but no one was willing to commit.

If they had known I was dying, would they have been able to take off work?

So I turned my back on my friends and family, and turned to the Internet.

Free Adventure

Wanted: Traveling Companion.

No strings attached. All fares paid for by me. Must live in DC area. Plane departs on Thursday, 2/4. Will be gone for 2-3 months. 

Must be a good traveling companion and can't be annoying. More thrill-seeking the better.

We're going to India, BTW.

There was more bewildered responses, wanting to know if it was a scam but three people came forward in the end.

An elderly man, a college grad student who was majoring in anthropology, and a guy about my age who was incredibly handsome, if not anything else.

So the three of us met for the first time at Dover outside the Delta Airlines ticketing counter.

We introduce ourselves. I left out the dying part, but I did have a plan for that. Sorta.

The four of us boarded a late-night plane and continued chatting. The anthropology student kept mostly to herself, studying the entire trip there. The elderly man slept for the later part of the flight leaving me to speak to the handsome guy.

It was amazing how much we revealed to one another in the 8 hour flight to London. Typical social boundries had been torn down when they agreed to fly to India with me, without ever having met me.

At breakfast in London's airport, the elderly man finally asked the question they were all thinking.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked. "You're young. How can you afford to throw away all this money?"

I had already assured them we would be financially stable.

"I want an adventure," I said. "But I don't want to be alone."

The anthro student sipped her coffee.

"This trip is exactly what my major needed, so you won't hear me complaining," she said. She gave me a thankful nod.

"Why did you come?" I asked the elderly man, not rudely but genuinely curious.

"My wife just died," he said. "The medical bills got expensive. But she wanted to be cremated and knowing her, it wasn't so that her ashes could sit on a mantle for me to obsess over until I die. I think she'd like to be scatter somewhere exotic."

"That's beautiful," I said. Did I want the same thing?

Then there was the handsome guy.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"I saw my life as going nowhere fast," he said. "Unless I changed something. If you were to have Googled 'free adventure' when I did, your ad would have popped up."

"Alright," I said. The alarm on someone's phone went off and we returned to our gate.

And two months later we were seated around a table again, tea lights glowing above us and candles lighting the tables around us.

We were laughing to the point of crying as the elderly man regaled us with tales of his glory days.

Early that day, we had scatter his wife's ashes, a woman we had come to know through his stories, off the back of a fishing boat going 50 mph across the Indian Ocean.

The resturant we were at was just on the coast, where we had spent the last month after the first month was spent inland. I could see the beach and my eyes glazed over as I watched the waves and the distantly setting sun.

As for my medical condition, two months had worsened it. Medications were able to keep it to an unnoticiable minimum but there was something so profound about this day in the history of my life that seemed right.

Right in the sense that today was an appropriate day to die.

It would be the conclusion to an epic two months, despite being tragic in nature.

When we returned to the apartment, I was beginning to feel my body give into the disease eating it alive, now that I had officially given up.

I pulled a letter out of my suitcase and read it over one last time.

Dearest companions,

Thank you for the adventure of a lifetime. I'm afraid my time has come to leave you. Use the money remaining here to pay for the rest of your stay and your return home. Do not worry about me. You've made the last two months the best of my life. It wasn't the food, the sights, or the absolute grandness of it all. I would have loved these two months just the same if we were in boring Wyoming, as long as you three were there. 

But do not stand at my grave and weep.

For I am not there.

I'm some place much greater. 

All of my love,

And a fancy signature.

Would that be enough?

Would that be a good enough goodbye to the people who knew me best?

It was going to have to be.

So I left the letter on my made bed and left the apartment, traveling back to the same beach that I had watched only an hour before.

I walked on the dirty beach, so inelegant when faced against the water. But I sat in the sand amongst the trash anyways.

My head ached terribly but the constant crashing of the waves seemed to soothe it, just a little bit.

I wanted some assurance that I wouldn't wake up in the morning.

But the violent cold spreading through my body seemed to promise me some sort of darkness.

I looked out at the water.

My last moment.

My eyelids were heavy as if the weight of my throbbing head was pressing them closed.

One.

Last.

Moment.

mere_inkslinger

"Five more minutes..." I mumbled into my pillow.

"Ronnie! You have to be at the ceremony in half an hour!" Mom screamed at me.

Half an hour? I thought I still had a whole one!

I rolled out of bed and onto the floor. Using the momentum from falling through the air, I rolled and stood. I felt a little dizzy, but I could walk if I held onto the railing.

"MOM! PUT SOME POP-TARTS IN THE TOASTER!" I screamed into the kitchen from the bathroom.

I started running water in the shower and threw off my clothes. I gathered my toothbrush, toothpaste, hair brush, and facial soap and threw them into the tub.

How do I have time for this?

As I stood under the warm water, I scrubbed my head to rinse it, and brushed through it with a hair brush to keep it from tangling. I didn't bother to use shampoo.

This will get rid of the oil and the smell.

I bent down and picked up my soap, washed my face, and then put some tooth paste on my tooth brush.

If my audience only knew what I was doing, right now...

I brushed my teeth, spitting into the shower floor and rinsing with the overhead.

After turning off the water, I squeezed my hair and put it up in a towel. The I walked into my room.

I dried myself with a second towel, and then put on my leggings and tee-shirt. I would wait and put on my cap and gown when I got to the stadium.

"TEN MINUTES!" Mom yelled down the hall.

I grabbed my trusty one-shoulder bag and started shoving things inside. I threw in my phone, phone charger, a granola bar I found under my bed, some cash, a small brush, a pen, a notepad, and a bottle of water.

"COMING, MOM!" I announced, fleeing my bedroom.

I grabbed the toaster pastries and shoved a piece in my mouth.

Mom followed me to my car.

"Ronnie, why don't you let me drive you?" Mom asked, gingerly.

"Why?" I asked.

"It's just, you have the rest of your life to drive yourself, but right now you have someone else to drive you. Let me." She pleaded.

"Okay." I agreed.

Maybe mom is having one of those "oh dear Jesus my little baby is growing up!" moments.

I threw everything in the back seat of her car, and we sped off, going strait for the graduation ceremony.

"Slow down!" I cried, as if I was about to be thrown through the windshield.

If she had braked any harder, I might have.

When we arrived, I dug my gown out of the trunk and threw it on. I threw mom my bag and started sprinting for the stage.

"Ah! There she is." I could hear our principal mutter, not far enough away from the microphone. It wasn't like a lot of people were going to hear him mess up; my graduating class only had about eighty people in it.

That's most likely why I, of all people, am the Valedictorian.

I jumped up on the stage with both feet, clutching my gown like I was a princess. I got a few laughs, which was a nice ice breaker. In the back of the room, I watched Mom scurry in to hear. She looked like she had been crying.

"Classmates, leaders... children of the future!" I addressed. I got a little too excited on that last part, raising my arms over my head like a Baptist preacher.

"Can anyone tell me why we are all standing around out here, listening to teachers give us speeches, wearing dresses..." I asked. Most of my peers smiled. I took the microphone out of its stand and pointed it at Greg Flixon.

"Because we're THE GRADUATING CLASS OF 2020!" He shouted, holding my fingers so the mic would catch every word he cheered. The rest of my class shouted and whooped, some danced and jumping around. Kip, the smallest kid in the whole school, was somehow placed on Johnny Simmons's shoulders. He went along with it, raising his hands and cheering.

"Yes, Greg. We sure are. We are graduating! And with graduation, comes great responsibility. Once we receive our diplomas, it's goodbye Varsity sports." I pointed to Max, the most athletic kid in the class, who is going to college to college on a baseball scholarship. "It's goodbye Homecoming." I gestured to Sarah Jay, which was the Homecoming Queen this year. "It's goodbye cafeteria tacos!" I reported, with all seriousness. Many snickered.

"But most importantly, we loose this time. We loose some rights. No longer may we run into our office buildings and make out with our girlfriend at our employee lockers. No longer may we put our peas on our spoons and launch them at people a grade below us." I commanded. "That'll probably get you a restraining order." I mumbled into the mic.

"But most importantly," I stressed the last word. "We loose this time." There was a serious pause. "This time of brotherhood, this time of peace. This time, in a world that isn't at war. A world that is still a long ways away. A world, that isn't your's yet."

I sat down criss-crossed style, cradling the microphone against my chest. It was getting heavier with every word I breathed.

"Well I'm here to tell you, when you receive that diploma, the world is your's. You can go in any freaking direction you want! Just go! Don't wait. Don't waste your time. Because you don't have this time anymore. High school is borrowed time. When you leave this stage, you are powering your own clock. You choose if you want to wake up tomorrow, you choose if you want to go to college, you choose if you want to buy cafeteria tacos or if you want to open your own gosh dang taco restaurant! It's your call. Don't waste your call."

I went on, telling the story of how a famous man set out to "live his dream" and ended up dying while on the job.

"The most honorable way to die, I believe, is to die doing something you love. Maybe that's pumpkin carving, maybe that's cliff diving, or maybe it's taking care of other dying people. Whatever floats your boat of happiness, set sail, and don't drop your anchor until you find what you're looking for."