Your life is winding down, old boy. Do you feel the slackening of the bonds that hold you in place? Hasn’t time become more elastic since it started?
He lifts his wrist with that heavy gold symbol on it. It was a punctuation to his working life – all the leaden minutes of that last day where his feeling of impending uselessness were transformed into a watch. Here is your watch; it has been engraved. Watch – wasn’t that all that was left?
He’d loved her, and it had lasted longer than he could have hoped for. Children came and grew from the acorn possibilities promised from that first ultrasound picture, until their crown shyness made them desire to be uprooted and planted elsewhere.
They were intermittent visits at first, and then they became intermittent phone calls, engaged signals, and then something less. Silence is an invitation for actions outside of the daily life.
You start to think about it before it condenses within your space as some malady to edit you out of the everyday. There are shadows sneaking in. And maybe for a second you glow brighter than you ever have before. You say something profound like Oh, and then you blink out like a broken bulb. The thing they get rid of and transform into cremains has little to do with you. The plaque that is on the grave has word that are more to do with the idea of you, but no one reads it, so what does that matter?