"Well, I don't like that," I said, pacing in the front room.
"You knew it was coming," my roommate Oscar said. "Mine is coming up in November."
"And we're supposed to fine with it?"
"It's to keep the planet from plummeting into famine and to keep government costs down," Oscar reminded. "We all voted on it."
"The vote was 50 years ago. No one who cast a vote on it is alive anymore," I explained. "Well, I refuse to do it."
"You can't. Their agent will just do it, and it probably won't be painless like you could make it. You might as well just do it. Or, better yet, I'll do it."
"How would I do it? Just leave? Go into hiding?"
"That sounds terrible. You would just live the woods? Somehow I think you doing that would just end up being suicide," Oscar laughed.
"So you're not going to help?" I asked him.
"No one has ever been able to live longer than four hours past turning 35, you know," Oscar said.
"I know. I should just accept my fate. How should I do it?"
"I've had several friends slit their wrists. My sister swallowed pills and went to sleep. I knew a couple who just blew their brains out," Oscar explained. "I'm thinking of doing pills."
"What if I set myself on fire? Would it take the government agent that comes to check on you a while to verify if it's me? It'd be nice if I could make my death as complicated as possible for them."
"I don't know. They'd probably just find the chip they implant in you at birth," Oscar said.
"What if I pry the chip out? How long would identification take?"
"You are really thinking about this too much," Oscar said.
"I am spending the exact amount of time someone should think about something like this," I said. "35 is barely enough time to do anything. I'm still single and living with a roommate. I work a crappy job in a strip mall."
"You should take a vacation and kill yourself on the vacation," Oscar said. "One last hurrah."
"Maybe," I thought out loud. "Why couldn't the age limit be 50? That makes more sense."
"Just stop," Oscar said. "You can't get out of it so why are you complaining? This is beyond our control. You can't run. You can't hide. Just buckle down and do it."
I nodded and walked into my bedroom. I watched a movie, rubbed one out, and then broke apart one my disposable razors to get to the blade. I still had a week but what was the point? I moved a trash can close to my bed and dangled my arm over the edge. Taking the razor blade, I pressed the corner into my skin, piercing it, drawing blood, and slowly dragged it down my wrist. It hurt but not as much as I thought it would. I closed my eyes, feeling the blood stream out into the trash can, the pain slightly throbbing, and waited for the end.
I awoke on the playground to my elementary school, playing with the friends I had at that time. We ran around like idiots, screaming and laughing as we went from the jungle gym to the slide to the monkey bars to the castle tower. It was here that I was always at my happiest and everything was as clear as day. Everything was as I remembered it and I wondered if this was my Heaven. All of our thoughts and memories are saved into the chip implanted in us at birth. Does it activate our happy memories at death so we each have our own personal Heaven?
As me and my friends ran around the playground, I put on those awful orange, purple, and green sunglasses I used to always wear. I used them when I wanted to say I had vision powers when we were pretending to be superheroes. We continued running around like morons, making laser noises and explosions with our mouths. Maybe committing suicide at 35 wasn't that big of a deal after all.
