Countdown

Darker days beginning. 28 years and counting. I'm no longer living as much as I an slowly dying. A crescendo peaking over to denouement, the best part of my story already told. I'm startled to see my hair circling the drain; my existence is oxidizing, from the top to bottom. I have visions of turning into a spectral gray, a mass of colorlessness, a vanguard of lost youth, haunted and hovering over the living with warnings of doing all that you can now. I know that later is my now, and now is six feet under. The faint dull thumps lodged in the chest is fast becoming the sound of an unseen hand working a trowel, striking the wet earth.

And soon I'll start to shrink. My bones will rob me blind, corpuscle by corpuscle. My mind, my heart will follow suit. Too tired to grasp or remember, the area is evacuating. The solace that awaits me over the horizon is that in the end, I'll be too small and dumb to realize that the strip of road I have taken for granted has become air underfoot. A fluttering gray speck is all that will be left of me.

Zephyr, are you there? Will you blow me down or raise me up?

I think I will fall endlessly. I'm afraid I won't like the feeling.