Something Truly Significant

This was a prologue for a short story about a man who, one morning, decides to turn his life around. Unfortunately, it is the morning of the first day of Amageddon...

I hate you…

This was the first thought of Theordore Blot, senior partner of the prestigious Blot & Associates, as he stood naked in the full-length mirror of his penthouse apartment bathroom. The ornate gilded mirror, like the opulent apartment itself, cost a fortune.  The naked body in the mirror, however, was free and from the look of its bulbous belly, saggy liver-spotted skin and balding scalp, not something anyone would willingly pay much for anyway.

What happened to you, Teddy?  You used to really be something…

 He grabbed his belly on both sides and lifted it in a vain attempt to place it back where he remembered it being.  Unfortunately, this only brought the unsightly hairy mass closer to eye level and caused his navel to widen, making it more grotesque.

You’ve done it this time, Teddy.  You went and got old…

 He did indeed “get” old, but not in the way someone “gets” a new coffee table and more in the way someone “gets” the flu – unintentionally and without noticing the point at which it was gotten. 

Theodore ceased focusing on the belly and looked up, squinting at the dangling dewlap where a handsome chin once resided.  He tugged at the flaccid skin, hoping to find traces of the man he used to be.  

Where did you go, Teddy? Are you still there under all this rot?

He peered up further, beyond his porous nose, to his eyes.  And there, amidst the wrinkles and wear, he saw the baby blue eyes of young Teddy – the boy who had once yearned to escape his circumstances and conquer the world.

“Ah, there you are!” he said to the face in the mirror, sloppily smacking his lips as he spoke. “It’s been a while...  I… I hate to tell you this… but we wasted it.  A full lifetime of potential and we squandered every last bit of it… Frittered away behind a desk one hour at a time…”

A solitary tear welled up in his right eye, and he brushed it away with trembling fingers.

“Oh, don’t get all emotional on me now, Teddy… This was what you wanted too!  When you are young, you spend all your energy trying to make your existence into something significant, but you never stop to ask yourself the kind of something it should be.  Then one day you wake up and find that the something you made is a monster and it has swallowed you whole!  Significance was always more in the dreaming than the having....”

It was in that moment that Theodore had an epiphany. He smiled at the face in the mirror. 

“Why did we ever stop dreaming, Teddy? Could I not dream of being healthier? Doing some good in this world? Having a family? A quiet little place on a lake far from the city? I could still do all those things… Today might very well be the first day of something truly significant…”

He was correct. Today was indeed the beginning of something truly significant, but, regrettably, that something was Armageddon.