He kind of always hoped he’d die young. It wasn’t that he hated life—he didn’t go hand-fishing or yell “Selena’s the devil!” at a Cinco de Mayo parade—but he kept a quiet wish for an early demise in his back pocket.

It was the way people mourned the young dead, how they eulogized and remembered only the good things about the early departed. It was how every memory of a person who went “before his time” became a treasure to those left weeping and laughing through the tears while they shared stories. It was the potential unfulfilled, stolen by fate.

Of course, he knew, he was at fate’s mercy. He couldn’t force her fickle hand; that left only a sticky web of sorrow and guilt and what-if and if-I-had-only-done-this-or-that. No, that wasn’t the way he wanted it.

A tragedy is what he wanted, a knee-buckling phone call in the middle of dinner and the switchboard lights popping as the news spread from home to home. Something he'd never see coming—quick and easy, no suffering—would have suited him fine.

Alas, it was not meant to be.

He popped the cork, raised the bottle to his reflection in the window, and took a hit. With the fizzy burn of cheap champagne, he exhaled a half-century of futility, of unfulfilled potential he wished had been stolen. He looked again at the window, his last friend smiling back at him, and said, “Happy Birthday, you crazy, old fool.”