Tomorrow’s much too long

In the midst of his panic the world came to a complete standstill. The earth’s spin halted. Frozen in time, 03:44 to be exact, everything hung in a perfect stillness until all of existence flattened and extinguished. No fade to black, just a sudden snap and it was all gone.

It had been a day like any other, everyone going about their lives without much thought. Billy sat on the sidewalk reading his comic book and day dreaming as he had every day for as long as he could remember. It was an unusually hot day, like most days, but Billy never minded because hot days meant good days on the truck. Bringing some happiness into the world felt like a noble and righteous purpose and allowed him to understand his place in the world. 

Because of his condition, Billy had lost much of his memory. He’d never been diagnosed with anything and couldn’t recall the last time he’d even seen a doctor. He would lose moments of his day, slipping in and out of daydreams with vivid hallucinations, loss of hearing, and inexplicable gaps in time. He’d grown accustomed to the symptoms and had been able to find a way to have as normal of a life as possible by following a routine and avoiding unpredictable circumstances. 

For many people, patterns can become monotonous, but for Billy having a routine to follow brought comfort, a sort of purpose that can only be felt by knowing exactly what is to be done and doing it. He hadn’t always been an ice cream man, or at least he didn’t think he had. Though he’d lost most of his past, he had hazy memories, as if recorded on Super8 film, cut together in some loose semblance of a narrative. He didn’t like to think about these memories too much as they felt disorienting, as if some psychedelic trip had gone wrong and left him without enlightenment, without a greater sense of his place in this world, just a whirlwind of color and sound.

As he handed out the ice cream cones to each of the children he was overcome with the sense that today was the greatest day he’d ever known. Though he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why, he did know that he was doing something that mattered, something worth doing. When all the kids had received their treats, Billy took off out of town, in a direction that felt different, new somehow, yet hauntingly familiar. The feeling of enduring deja vu had just begin to fade when like a tornado ripping through his reality he saw her, or rather he saw him.

It was now 01:23 and the fabric of his reality began fraying and he was powerless to do anything about it. Everything was backwards, reversed as if the world had somehow been flipped. Despite this recognition and the absolute terror it struck in him, Billy continued about his day as he had every day before. Had it not been for the man in the dress, he probably wouldn’t have even perceived the change as it was so all encompassing that Billy hadn’t sensed it, but there he stood as familiar as ever only, backwards. 

As long as his memory could strain to look back, the man had always been there, and he’d always been on the right side of the road standing in a floral pattern dress and purple tights. Billy would pull up and slide out of his seat to the floor of the truck. Something in seeing the world on it’s head had always made things more beautiful to Billy, like the upside down world had an awkwardness that heightened it’s charm. Just as he had the day before and every day before that Billy executed his part, knowing all the while something wasn’t right. But today was different. How had the man in the dress ended up on the left side of the road? What did it mean? What was happening? All at once a wave of realization flooded over him.

Every single day, he’d sit on the sidewalk, read his comic book, and see flashes of his deepest urges. His timeline would jump and cut, but he’d come to understand this as his life. He’d drive out of town, thinking to himself “today is the greatest day I’ve ever known,” and he’d believed it. Each day it would happen like this, Billy would move through his morning knowing that he was experiencing the single greatest day he’d ever known, only to start driving and see everything turn to chaos. The realization of this endless loop would bring him comfort in the repetition, allowing Billy to ground himself in the world and be what was expected of him.Until today, until this today. It was all different. Billy knew it was, yet he couldn’t do anything about it. He continued through the motions, trapped as if watching a video of himself, of his life, and the video was on repeat. 

Just as he had always done, he stopped for gas, or as this reality had it “SAG.” While pumping his gas he was approached by a group of people who were at once unfamiliar and his closest companions. They fell in like they had a longstanding friendship that with its rich history made the absurdity of their behavior make sense. In mere moments they were all falling over one another, smearing paint on themselves and the truck. The man in the dress re-emerged from behind the station in a cowboy hat and off they went. He felt the urges re-emerging while he spun and whirled in the paint, in the back of his mind he heard a voice saying “I wanna turn you on.” 

He felt euphoria, a sense of purpose, belonging, as if the secrets of life had opened themselves up to him. Only, he didn’t. Not like he had before, not like he knew he should. It was off, everything was off. Straining to let go of the gnawing feeling that everything was falling apart Billy desperately tried to embrace this new/old/familiar/strange gang that he’d spent a lifetime with and was only just meeting. As if on cue, his grasp on reality slipped away from him.

The gang threw him out of his truck and sped away, leaving Billy alone in a field surrounded only by his visions. With a gentle wave, which he always gave and never knew why, they were gone and he was alone with nothing but the cowboy hat in his hand that was just somehow there.

He placed the hat upon his head and began to walk when it happened, at exactly 3:44, he froze. Silence fell over everything. The truck ceased speeding away, all those in it presumably frozen. Billy was still awake, conscious, and that is when he noticed the strangest circumstance of the entire day. Off, over the horizon the sun was setting, and it was beautiful. He had a sudden flash of deja vu and the phrase ringing through his mind “I’ll burn my eyes out, before I get out.” Where had he heard that? What did it mean? Billy realized that in this moment, it didn’t matter, because it was perfect. Everything was perfect.

Billy let go of everything, he stopped fighting, stopped resisting and just hung, suspended in space, unable to do anything and free from everything all at the same time. The release of all he had been holding on to, the nagging feeling that his life was meaningless, that he simply woke up each day to repeat the exact same motions, the exact same actions had left him. It had changed. It was then he noticed what should have been a clue from the beginning, as the truck sat frozen in motion behind him it dawned on him that it was heading West. Yet, in front of him hung the majestic sunset. As the vastness of this happening washed over him, still suspended at 3:44 it all ended. 

In a flash, with a simple click, his world had come to an end, 16 seconds short of it’s full run time. Like some cruel, detached god of yore, the viewer had closed the tab. The universe contained within https://www.mirrorthevideo.com/watch?v=xmUZ6nCFNoU was no more. With it’s unceremonious destruction collapsed Billy’s world, one in which he was just a little freer from the bounds of Copyright law, living in backwards reality where DMCA bots were just a littler further away from finding him and he could live royalty free, sneaking past the algorithms designed to detect and remove his existence. In this “Today,” his world had been a reflection of itself, in this “Today,” the sun rose in the west and set in the east.