What happens when everything has been taken from you and all you have left is your pack of cigarettes and a really long driveway

i wrote this short story after about 7 years of observing the person i based the story on. so here it is.


He had not been happy in a very long time. There were brief periods of contentment, but never the kind of unadulterated bliss that brings with it unbearable lightness of self. No- he hadn’t felt that in a very long time.
The sorrow he felt had entered like the plague on that October day, through his nostrils, mouth and eyes, coursing it’s way down his trachea and leaving it’s mark in his retinas. Burning, burning, burning, always-
It had settled in his core, taking up residence in his arthritic bones, with every bending of his joints and crack of the knuckles, he released it into his bloodstream, like a quick poison bringing speedy death.
He stood at the top of his long driveway with his almost finished cigarette threatening to burn the skin between his pointer and middle finger. But like most other things, he was numb to it. Sometimes, or more like every afternoon, he would pace up and down this driveway. It was if pacing up and down the cracked tarmac would bring some sort of resolution. He felt that by reaching the end of the driveway he would arrive at a conclusion of sorts, and every time he was disappointed when he didn’t, and had to turn around and walk back with shuffling steps filled with despair. Once he reached the top he turned around- down again.
He fantasized about reaching the end of his driveway and having a car there waiting for him, waiting to take him away to some comfortable place, somewhere warm and compact and comprehensible. Somewhere not here, not scratchy and stark and baffling. Somewhere-
Maybe he did this because he had nothing better to do. Maybe because watching the hours melt away or the seasons change before his eyes would alter something, or make anything better.
This past year everything that could have possibly gone wrong did. Dead son, lost job, it went on and on. It wasn’t that he didn’t have anything left to live for- that wasn’t the case. The damnable weight he felt pressing on his rotting soul wasn’t the result of fatalistic or suicidal thoughts. It was his desire. Desire for hope, salvation, even some form of fucking comfort.
He was the grape in the proverbial vineyard of life. Waiting to be crushed, waiting for his insides to squeeze through the toes of whatever sadistic fucker decided to play God. Everything that made him whole was slowly being taken away. As he flicked his cigarette away, he looked up at the sky and with whatever bit of passion or fervor he had left he screamed
- Just do it you motherfucker, and then at last,---

He turned around and walked back up the driveway.