Cliché

I watched as his eyes slowly closed. There was nothing I could do that wouldn’t be clichéd. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t burst into a violent angry rage. I couldn’t even stand there, numbed by pain, without morphing into the thousands of others who had just lost someone they loved. My whole life, I had tried desperately to break away from the cliché.
I had left my job as the head of maths and computing in a prestigious secondary school so as to not become another drone, spilling out facts to the sponges who sat before me. I had married in a red dress. Scarlet. No-one ever married in Scarlet. I turned down my husband’s proposal several times as he was just being to clichéd. Eventually, he managed to come up with a way of asking me to marry him that didn’t scream ‘Hugh Grant movie’. My whole life I had been running desperately away from the cliché of life. I had wanted to make my life different from the millions that started and ended every year. My life was never going to make a difference to everyone else’s, I wasn’t beautiful, clever or rich enough to do that. But I vowed to make sure that everything, from going to the supermarket to making love, didn’t seep the oozing pus of a cliché.
My parents were both terribly clichéd. My mother disliked spiders and the dark and enjoyed novels in which the assistant fell in love with the married boss, and overcame great hurdles to be with the man she loved. My father became a small country doctor, despite having the intelligence to become something much greater. He and my mother became absorbed into country life, telling stories of their 60’s rebellion to fellow ordinarily boring clichés.
But as I stand here, watching the withered body in front of me, I find myself not focusing on the death of someone I had loved so intensely, but on whether I’m becoming a cliché. Perhaps my desperation to avoid a cliché has only driven me to become one. Perhaps I have become so absorbed in making my life different, anything that happens to me seems too ordinary.
Perhaps.
Perhaps everyone is a cliché. In birth. In life. And In death, especially.
Everyone closes their eyes and feels nothing.
Everyone else watches them. Doing the same things. Acting the same way. Tears falling onto the floor. Fists clenched in anger at the unfairness of it all.
Try as you might, there is nothing really you can do to stop it.
Life is one great big fucking cliché.