23 Years Later

Sunflower

In 2002, I was forty-four, feeling both younger and older than my years, while carrying the weight of divorcing my wife (or she divorced me, as she should have). Like most divorced men of that age, I rushed into a new relationship with eagerness to prove something—to myself or to the world. Glen and I took a place together in the heart of DC, blinded by what was meant to be romance. He was orderly, organized, attentive. He decorated the place; tried to make it a home. I helped pay the bills.

He had made it look nice, but I hardly noticed. Attention to detail is not my forte. Within a few months, the apartment felt small and suffocating. The air was dense, accentuated by our bantering quarrels: "We don't need that, I don't want that, let's not splurge." That sort of thing.

Eventually, even the semi-humorous banter died. Our talk thinned. The silences lengthened. I knew what it meant-- but I let it be.

In public, you would have perceived me as successful: I worked in the legal department of an aerospace company, maintained my fitness and discipline by training for triathlons, and thrived by Washington's standards. Sadly, that was all for show.

One night, before bed, I laid my gym clothes on the chair for the following morning. Glen watched me with his nose and eyes popping out of the sheets. This I found endearing.

“Are you getting up at 5 a.m.?” he asked.

“It’s the only time I get to train,” I said. “You know it’s part of my routine.”

“You care more about the gym than us,” he muttered, turning away.

His words stayed in the room long after we turned off the lights.

My morning session at the gym was the only pleasure I allowed myself—an hour or two dedicated to my body, preparing me for the ten to twelve hours of work waiting for me at the office. The office, where "yes sir," and "I'm on it," and "I can solve that for you" fell out of my mouth as an automatic reflex, while I choked on my own words.

I would arrive to the Reston fitness club at 5:30 each morning. It was in a commercial strip mall, which included a small movie theater, playing one or two movies at a time. For weeks, maybe months, it’s marquee advertised the same movie title: 28 Days Later. I hadn't seen the film and knew little about it. This was before the internet was within easy reach, when curiosity wasn't answered in a click. I only had two sources to inform me about the movie: the billboard poster—a blood-red warning marked with a biohazard symbol—and a brief newspaper review that called it an "apocalyptic horror." That phrase lingered in my mind.

I clipped the newspaper review and stuck it inside my car's glove compartment. There was something about end-of-the-world films that resonated with me. The fundamental premise of such films is never about zombies or plagues; it's about endings, about reducing life to its most basic elements. Something was ending in my life, though I refused to acknowledge it. My fifteen-year marriage to the mother of my children had fallen apart, and my new live-in relationship with a man with whom I mainly shared silence was fading. The armor I wore at the gym and the office began to weigh me down. Every morning, as I passed that glowing movie title on the marquee, I wondered what it would be like to live in a world stripped of obligations, to stand alone without expectation or pressure.

For weeks, I found myself obsessing over the film. I imagined a solitary man walking through empty streets, where shop windows were smashed, newspapers blew across intersections, and traffic lights blinked over desolate spaces. Sometimes, I envisioned myself pushing open the theater doors alone, sitting in the darkened room, watching the reel spin just for me. Although I never saw the film, I pictured it more vividly than most dreams. 28 Days Later became a reflective mirror of my unease and isolation.

One morning, while checking in at the gym's front desk, I held out the small fob from my keychain and nonchalantly asked the handsome kid working there, “Have you ever seen that movie next door?”

“Yeah,” he replied enthusiastically, as most young men do when talking about horror movies. “It's excellent! You should go see it. You're here all the time anyway.”

“I wish I could,” I told him.

He grinned and smirked, “Then just go see it, man.”

“I don't have time,” I replied, slipping the fob back into my pocket. The kid laughed and shook his head. I rushed to the locker room to strip into my bathing suit, and proceed to 40 laps in 30 minutes. Followed by an hour of running on the treadmill . The woman next to me complained about my heavy breathing:

“Can’t you be quiet?” she moaned.

“Lady, I have asthma.”

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That evening, after arguing with Glen over petty nonsense—our favorite topic—we ate quietly and politely at the kitchen table, devouring the healthy meal he prepared, as he did every night. The conversation was sluggish, nearly dead, our forks clicking against our plates. At one point, he asked about my day. Two bitefuls later, I responded with a single, dismissive word: “Fine.” Chew, chew, chew. Then silence.

We fought again after dinner, not in a passive-aggressive, genteel manner, but with harsh words, loud voices, and accusations—anger building on anger. Glen was unkind. I was worse.

We went to bed without apologizing. I lay awake, staring at the ceiling while Glen slept with his back turned. He snored loudly, which I once found charming, but the dead silence in the bedroom pressed down upon me, heavy and endless. The red movie poster at the theater glowed closer to me than Glen did in bed.

Twenty-eight days later, we split up.

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Twenty-three years later, in 2025, I finally watched the film when Netflix put it on my TV.

I am nearly an old man now—long past those obsessive dawn workouts, the divorce from my first spouse, the breakup with my first male partner, and the itch to prove myself.

I sat down alone to view the film that had haunted me for so long, and to my surprise, it turned out to be desperately boring. 28 Days Later. Whatever magic I had assigned to it far exceeded the story on the screen.

I muted the TV set halfway through the feature, and caught my reflection on the wide black screen. The face staring back was older and softer around the edges, no longer the man who punished his body each morning before dawn.

It brought back the image of that younger, angry man: a lawyer pursuing success, sculpting his body in the gym, driving myself with ambition to cover the emptiness, searching for love after so many breakups, all the while fixated on a horror movie he never saw. I realized that what had captivated me back then wasn't the film itself—28 Days Later—but the escape that the end-of-the-world story represented.

I stood in front of the giant television, talking to myself out loud, as I always do. “Is that it?” I said. “I waited twenty-three years for this?”

The empty room gave no answer, and I laughed. My laugh felt lighter than silence as the past rolled down my back. Sometimes, the things we experience—the choices we make and the ones we don't—linger unevenly. The memories yellow, like that movie clipping I once tucked inside my glove compartment.

Ernesto Beckford  

October 2025  

© Ernesto Beckford 2025

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