A/N: This is a one shot I wrote in less than an hour. I like it the way it is, but I've been thinking about writing a supplement to it called "8 am (Poor Richard's Suicide Note)", but I don't plan on revising this story at all since the backstory and supplementary information provided in "8 am" will be extraneous and take away from what I'm trying to capture with this story. You're the reader; Let me know what you think.

Poor Richard (another 3 am)

Poor’s eyes burned as she stared at that damn computer screen. It had been precisely three and one half hours since she had started writing. Four cups of bitter tea she prepared in the microwave, several fun-size candy bars, whose wrappers now littered the desk, and a plan for a suicide attempt ago, she noticed that the time was 11:11. She had wished to finish the story and get to bed at a reasonable hour. The biggest flaw in her wishful thinking was that 11:11 was already an unreasonable hour. Unreasonable not only because it was so late, but because people always felt it necessary to make frivolous wishes on such a time of day as if time really existed. Time, Poor had thought, was just a suggestion made by an assembly of mechanical counting machines that were never correctly assembled. When the clock struck 2:42, Poor’s eyes closed trying to draw a plot out of her current thoughts.

Poor Richard hated the story she was writing. It was all too typical. Cal Benet was going to die. Cal Benet was going to die because his creator, Poor Richard hated him. He had taken many forms in many stories but they all ended the same, because one person can only have one story. This one person had a long story that he had told to Poor Richard, and she had loved it, but to rewrite it meant to give a book eyes to lie with, and a façade to look behind, and a book only had covers, pages, and words with which a writer told the reader what was going on. The reader could not possibly feel the wind whipping through Cal’s perfect hair, or see his face that could have been carved from marble. They could possibly imagine the sunset that silhouetted his image against the sky. They didn’t feel the pain Poor Richard did when Cal Benet’s stalwart face broke into a million pieces or the sickening relief as he stepped off the ledge and walked toward of her. They didn’t feel the pang of regret as he walked past her with out looking at her. They didn’t fall to their knees and cry to a point of vomiting blood.

Poor Richard rose from her chair. There was a face staring at her all night, and she got quite sick of it. It was printed on paper that they hired unworthy writers to fill because the quality of the paper they used, itself, was next to worthless. Poor Richard didn’t care how crumpled the paper became in her hand as she brought it over to window and touched it to the dancing flame of a candle. The paper ignited quickly and she gave it to the breeze that swept out her window. The eyes in the picture stared blankly and Poor Richard remembered a time when he stared and it mean something. Now, the stares were only blank and only habitual.

Poor Richard had always figured Cal Benet would die by his own hand. He had been fascinated by death and had wondered about those who chose to die. He wasn’t interested in ending his constant pain, because his pain was what made him progress. He wasn’t interested in the psychology of the people and what made them lose their will to live. The most captivating concept was the embrace of death’s cold hand. He tried everything he could to try and imagine the feeling of stepping into infinity. He thought that it must be beautiful. He thought that since the day he held the weathered hand of his dying grandmother as she whispered her last words to him. “Never be afraid of the moment you die, because it is often the most triumphant moment of your life.” Poor Richard didn’t expect Cal Benet to die the way he did, and Poor regretted her hand in Cal’s death.

It was 2:46 AM, and sleep very well could have taken Poor Richard at any time had her mind been emptier. Poor Richard was not an avid smoker, but she could have done for a cigarette. The wind of the outside air lapped at her exposed skin and staring into the open field in front of her house did nothing to ease her mind. She left the window and left the room. She walked through the darkness of her house blindly, but she didn’t rely on her eyesight anyway. She picked a can of soda out the fridge. Her fingers took their sweet time opening the tab and she sat up on counter top, staring at the clock on the microwave. It was a terrible waste of the color green screaming at her that it was 2:55 in the morning and she wasn’t working.

The computer in Poor Richard’s bedroom only cemented the existence of time as an illusion. At 2:53, it told her that it had taken -2 minutes to take a couple sips of soda and go into the garage for some paint and a chunk of canvas her father used as a drop cloth. Her brush worked quickly and easily over the canvas as it painted an image of a boy on a roof, a girl on her knees, and open wound, the words they said, and a body mangled inside a totaled vehicle.

Cal Benet had wanted to embrace death and taste infinity when it was his time. Cal Benet knew death was the one who found you and there wasn’t a possible way to chose when to die. Unlike Poor Richard who tried to stop him, he knew when he was going to die. She convinced him to step off the ledge and give up infinity. Instead he died trapped in two tons of metal that had previously been a car.

Words worked within the picture but still didn’t describe what she felt. The images words and colors were blended into a miserable collage that happened all at once, which is just as it actually happened because time was an illusion. It was now 3 o’clock in the morning and Poor Richard still hadn’t finished.