2am. The water flowing through my neighbor’s pipes woke me up again. This was not an uncommon occurrence throughout the two years I’ve been living here. My neighbor was an elderly gentleman who went to the bathroom at least three times a night because his bladder has gotten too old to hold his urine.
Geoff was the least liked neighbor in our apartment due to his old-time antics. In the mornings, he often complained about Croatian politics on the third floor balcony of our apartment, announcing his dislike for the current way Croatia handled WWII.
When the running pipes wakes me up in the middle of the night, I usually use the bathroom myself and grab a glass of water. Tonight was no different.
As I finished up in the bathroom and stared at the mirror, I noticed that my hair had been messed up due to my tossing and turning around in bed.
I turned on the lights and poured myself a glass of water. The refrigerator can be heard humming. I can hear the air moving slowly outside. The kitchen stove read 2:07am. The lights shined brightly into my glass, where I could see my reflection showing me my bed head. I stared at my reflection in the glass for a few seconds before going back to bed.
The next day, I woken up to the sound of an ambulance. I learned from a neighbor that Geoff had fallen last night. I began to wonder if he had fallen while I was getting my glass of water. As much as I didn’t like the guy, I felt guilty of not hearing Geoff when he fell. I decided to do the last thing I would expect to do: visit Geoff at the hospital.
The shiny floors were kept clean enough to see my reflection. The lights everywhere were bright enough to burn your eyes. I’ve always wondered how hospitals were kept clean. Patients come in here at their worst and their only comfort are the clean hospitals.
Eventually I arrived at the room where a dying Geoff laid. The dying light in his eyes recognized his neighbor. He probably thought my name was “A” due to a lack of communication throughout the years we were living together. His dying voice could only muster out the word “water”, which I immediately began to approach the nearest sink and grabbed the nearest cup.
As I turned on the faucet, only light started to pour out. The light filled the cup from the bottom up. I filled the cup up half empty and began to walk over to Geoff. The light in the cup was shining brighter with every step that I took, and I could see my reflection within this light.
As I stood over Geoff, the light started to shiny brighter than ever before fading away. The face of Geoff in front of me was replaced by a face of me. Am I seeing myself in this light? Is this my reflection? Many questions raced through my head until the possibility occurred that Geoff and I could have switched bodies.
As my confusion grew, my empathy for Geoff grew stronger. This was someone who wanted to hang onto life more than I did. He couldn’t bear to get any older with all the pain and the possibility of leaving behind no legacy. He was an unmarried man with no family left in this world. I knew this when we were living together. If he could live again, he would do everything he could to die with a purpose.
Whereas for me, I reminded Geoff of his younger self. I had no family left in this world, destined towards the same fate as Geoff.
This arrangement was for the best: he could live through live one more time, while mine could be over for me one lifetime too soon. Geoff has lived through life once and knows how to make it better. He should be given a second chance to make his life better. Whereas I never got to know life, so skipping to the end would mean that I miss out on the life that I could’ve had, which I never imagined living through.
As these thoughts raced through my head, I saw myself, or more accurately, my body, blink for one last time before I closed my eyes for the last time.
As I lay there, I could imagine Geoff walking away with my body, with another chance at life.