If My Worst Fears Came True It Would Mean…?

From a writing prompt:

If my worst fears came true it would mean I’m 67, alone, dying, impoverished, publicly humiliated, and universally scorned. And it would be pervasive. You’d be risking your reputation just to come visit me. 

There would be wholly unflattering dick picks of me online that somehow make me look smaller than is humanly possible. That’s my story anyway, and I’m sticking to it. 

I’d be ridiculed for my fetishes, which would of course all have been made public decades ago, but unlike the changing news cycle these stories stick around like the gum under elementary school desks, still hanging there decades later, covered in spit and barely decaying. Hardened. Stale. Forgotten.  

But at the same time nobody has forgotten. Someone somewhere has been keeping a meticulous list of my failures and timids, my betrayals and regrets and cataloging them by category.  And reminding everyone. 

So even though I am forgotten, not one single one of my mistakes ever is. They are immortalized, judged as the worst of the worst, until my bubble burst and I had that public meltdown. 

You know the one where I ran naked on antipsychotic meds through the town square. That’s where the unflattering dick pics came from.  

I’d have a shred of hope that some experimental cure was going to help me live past the end of my 67th year only to find out my ungrateful adoptive children who don’t even exist yet were playing a prank on me. For fun. Because they are a failure too and I raised monsters. 

There is no cure. Never was.

I have a week to live. Maybe days or hours. The kids don’t know or care. The nurses are mean. The help is unhelpful and cruelest joke of all is that I…I…