Just the empty world covered in the grey wash of London.

The laptop makes a tinny tone that says it’s awake, and he opens his emails with one hand while reaching for the bagel with the other.

He scrolls. Nothing from his parents or his younger brother. Just junk from websites he has visited and some book recommendations and cheap flights to places he doesn’t ever want to visit.

The bagel is finished in a few bites. He pulls the envelope out from beneath the plate. The corner is slightly torn where his housemate mistakenly started to open it.

She was so lucky.

She can choose life to live.

He reads the first page, the four words that tell him that his time has come.

Nothing

Important

Happened

Today

The second page looks exactly like the one he has seen on the news.

The witness screws the notes into tiny paper balls and aims them at the overflowing garbage of lecture notes and discarded ideas. The first one lands on top, and he mockingly punches his fist in the air as if scoring the winning basket.

The second misses. He’s supposed to keep that one.

Then he’s on his knees picking up spilled papers, placing them with the others, tying a knot in the top of the plastic bag and dropping it from the top of the stairs onto the other rubbish bags below. They’ll be collected sometime next week.

He sees his neighbour returning to her room with the magazine tucked under her arm and the form of her buttock in those soft shorts draws his gaze downwards. She smiles to herself – he sees her ears lift slightly from behind. She knows what she is doing.

And he knows what he must do.

Nothing.

Not act on his impulses.

Not buy what she is selling.

Like any other day.

No point in changing things now.

The only way this day is different from any other is that he will not return to his room after lectures. He won’t have the opportunity to read a note from his mother or father or brother. He has to go to a bridge and meet briefly with somebody he has never really seen before and commit himself to something profound.

His last email from home was three days ago and he can’t even remember what it said.

58

235 – NOBODY

There’s not much to say. His life has been fairly unremarkable.

The best thing he’ll ever do is throw himself off a bridge attached to a stranger whom he assumes feels the same way as he does. That they were both affected by what they saw that night.