It was more like a corridor than a room. A white hallway without much detail. Just a place with four whitewash walls, a grey floor - which had a few marks on from dragged trainers - and, at either end, a single light wooden door with a silver handle. The only windows were closed tight, and the blinds had been shut, all except the one opposite me.
How lucky.
Through the slatted wood I could see how dark it was still outside. How frozen, cold. How silent. The blind might as well've been closed; it had no lightening effect on the damp atmosphere through the echoing hall, or in the expanse of my empty head.
I could smell nothing except some sort of disinfectant: Bleach, possibly. It felt like that was everything I had ever smelt. The burning. It felt like someone was pouring bleach into my head, but without any pain. It felt like it was erasing me, like I needed disinfecting. I didn't protest, or put up any fight. It was okay. I mean, why did it matter anymore? Nothing mattered anymore.
Until someone spoke.
"I hope its quick."
I turned to the boy seated next to me on the simple wooden bench. He was non-descript. T-shirt, jeans, white trainers. He was looking down at his lap, his shaved head bent forwards in a kind of total submission, his stubby bitten fingernails partly hidden by his entwined hands. He was the opposite to me, yet now we were here, brought together in our final minutes.
I thought that those were the first words he had ever said to me. And, in any other circumstance, I would've ignored him. After all, I could never be seen making any contact with him. I had to hate him. It's the way society worked.
"It doesn't matter to me if its quick or not - we're still going to die."
"I know," he sighed.
"I just don't want to have to think about, you know, what happens next..."
"What does it matter?" I snapped, surprising us both.
"Well," he looked up slightly and his dark green eyes met mine, "I like to think we're going to be reincarnated, well, like the Buddhist's believe, I think. Like, we come back as something else, get another life. Because if we only get one life, I'm, well, a little disappointed."
Tick. Tick. Tick. These were the final minutes of my life.
"Disappointed?"
"I'm demanding a refund." He smiled for a fleeting second. "I'm going to die when I'm just 16, and those few years haven't been exactly... Fun... Worth while..." I didn't know what to say, but it appered didn't have to say anything anyway. In a quiet voice, this boy unwound everything I thought I knew about him. Had judged him to be. Broke him from the group I had stereotyped him into. "When I was 6, my twin brother died from a brain tumor... And, out of the two of us, he was the favourite. He was the one with a clear and incredible future ahead of him."
Tick. Tick. Tick.
"My mother coped okay for a while. Until my older sister started taking drugs. And then when she got pregnant at only 15, that's when my mum really lost it. Without my dad, because he left her before I was born, she couldn't handle it all and just picked up her bottle and took a mouthful, and then another and another until she couldn't focus anymore. From the age of 6 until I was 11, I had to put up worth her drunken shouting and the bruises that came with it. At secondary school I got bullied and tried to kill myself a few times... But I always wimped out, thinking of the future. Maybe I'll get a good job. Maybe I'll make lots of money and have a nice house and lots of sports cars and a swimming pool in my garden. Maybe I'll find someone to love me, be my wife and have children with me." He sniffed and shook his head. "I guess I'll never know."
There was a silence, the absence of his voice. It seemed even more silent than before. Just a lonely clock, a single sound that documented the passing of time.
"What," he began again, "what is love?"
It was such an abrupt question, with such depth, and the seriousness coating it like water. I didn't know what to say. I had been in a few serious relationships, and none of them had lasted longer than half a year. They had all fallen apart eventually. Cheated on, or an argument. No one I had been with was worth staying with. "Love... Is-"
"I know what you do when you're in love." he interrupted, "You kiss them, hug them, that sort of stuff..." His hand ran over the top of his head, then rested on the back of his neck. 'You... Want to spend all of your time with them. You would be with them for the rest of your life and all that... But... What does it feel like?"
I hadn't really thought about it. It wasn't a thing I had taken the time to examine. If you loved someone, it wasn't really a choice. It was just there.
A sharp click ripped through the comfortable silence, slicing my thoughts into unrecognisable shreds. A tall man stood in a white science lab coat in the doorway closest to us. In his hand he held a clipboard, and he glanced down at it, reading a name from it.
"Daniel McCloud?"
The boy next to me turned his head, his back straightening as his back pressed against the wood behind him. Very deliberately, his eyes locked with mine. He made sure he had my full attention - he did. For the first and last time, he looked at me, taking me in. There was no fear in his green eyes."I wonder if things would've been different if you had loved me."
Daniel McCloud stood quietly from the bench and crossed the space to the door and the man.
He let the man push him through the door and lock it behind him.
It was then that I shed a tear for him. I shed a tear for his life, and mine, which were both not going to exists for much longer. I shed a tear, then another, and another. I cried for him, more than me. For his life. For his unshared thoughts. But mostly for our love that never was. Our lives that never were.
