“In the midst of a record breaking heat wave, the East Bay has some absolutely stunning projections. Here we see that the Delta cities, Martinez, Pittsburg, and Antioch are not spared. Even over in Discovery Bay we are seeing one hundred and five over the weekend with only slight cooling to ninety eight by Monday. South of Mount Diablo, Walnut Creek and Davis are looking just as bad, with a hundred and three or thereabouts. Residents of Lafayette and San Ramon are advised to stay inside with those AC’s as much as possible, or you can take this time to try out those olds swimsuits. It's been a rainy year so this might be your only chance to get out there and get those laps in. Back to you Cheney…” 

The low hum of the motel aircon was not what woke her. Not even the television portraits that had not been silenced the night before. It was no special thing that pried her eyes open. It was just that she could not sleep forever. Such things were impossible, except, of course, when they weren’t. But thinking about that sort of thing was not exactly cheerful. There was no negative effect it had on her. Contemplating the benefits of living versus that other choices were normal for anybody. Just a casual thought; should I just die? That was a thing that not everyone was willing to seriously consider, but occasionally the joke would creep around in times of stress or exhaustion. In her case, it was that she did not want to wake up. Perhaps it was that she did not want to awake in that motel room, or in that city, or in that world. For a while the idea of being awake was not so terrible—so, the droll had been a recent affliction. 

Nevertheless, she spited herself by waking.

Such a strange thing, to spite oneself. To go against one's own personal desires so fully as to directly put their ego at risk of rupturing. People had desires, and to go against those meant going against the very existence of them as a consciousness. Then again, it was hardly as serious as all that. It was just that, when she was freshly removed from the lighted heaven of dreams, she was awfully cynical about a lot of things. She hated that she wanted to stay asleep forever, that she had awoken at all. That she chose to wear blue sneakers on her trip rather than the black runners that she was more comfortable in. She hated herself and in return hated her self right back. It was not a serious sort of event to be worried about, but there she was, angry that she had to wake up to the sound of the aircon and the ridiculous pompousness of the tv presenters. What business was it of hers that the weather was awful in some foreign place called Hayward? That had nothing to do with her, or her vacation. 

“If you had to do one thing that would define your entire life, what would it be?” 

“Smack you in the mouth,” she said, wiping the sleep from her eyes. 

In the corner of the room her bag sat, emanating a dull miasmic draw. Though, exactly what that phrase meant she had no idea. Nevertheless, it applied. Resisting said dull draw, she walked to the bathroom and splashed some water on her face. 

“One thing that would define all those years…”

The sleepless bags stuck to her face like permanent marker. Then again, maybe it would have been better to draw those dark eye sockets and make herself look like some kind of Halloween skeleton. Either way, there was no way she could go outside like that, right? But she had no concealer, no makeup to speak of. All she had was the clothes she wore and the backup which she had no desire to carry. 

“If someone asked about you in two hundred years, what would you want them to say?” 

“Nothing, I don’t care to be remembered like that anyways.” 

She sighed, straightening out her hair with her fingers. 

“So, you’d rather never have existed at all?” 

She returned to the main room and flicked the TV off, silencing the portraits for good. Or at least for as long as her boredom permitted. Which, considering the absolute leaden weight of her shoes, was quite a short amount of time. Still, she needed to go and do it. There were some things a person could put off until Armageddon, but you can never put off Armageddon itself. 

She hated mornings. 

Outside the sun was beating down just as awfully as the news suggested. She felt every ray baking her alive as she walked down the stairs and to the bus stop, backpack slung over her shoulder. Her timing was about right, and she only had to wait a minute or two before the large hunk of metal slowly crept up and stopped with a loud squeaking sound. She paid her fee and sat near the front as her stop was only a few blocks away. Walking would have been better, to save the two bucks, but that heat had perspired her fiercely. 

“Then, if you were not to exist, what would I be?”

Questions, questions. He always had questions. That was one thing about being a memory, he never had any answers. Somewhere, in the expanse of time and space, he may have, at the time of her riding that bus, known the answers to his questions. Still, she was sitting there and he was somewhere else entirely. A miserable wretch like him, she thought that she was better off without his tiresome platitudes about existence and whatnot. There were a great many things a person could do throughout their life that mattered, it just so happened that she had not done them. That was it. 

The bag smelled like wet dog. She had never smelled wet dog, but the smell reminded her of what she would think about whenever someone described something as smelling of wet dog. It was that sort of smell, and probably just her imagination.