The anguish of fading away…
Ancient. Well into the final months of his life, he approached me, all tubes and oxygen tanks, alone he walked, beneath the burden of his portable life-support system.
He glanced at me, young, before him. Images of his own youth flashed across the inside of his mind, the only part of him still feeling young, the only part that hadn’t visibly aged, interior self. My youth was a time-travel mirror-image in his eyes. Nostalgia hurts the old.
Visions of cherished memories, late-summer romances in near-forgotten years, the dreams, the hope life holds for the young, the hope life once held for him, faded now, vanquished, leaving the void only regret can ever fill, all brought back by our chance meeting, two strangers facing two human truths.
He stopped before me. Looked at me, beyond me.
”Ahh, if only I had your youth…”
I could feel his feeling of fleshly imprisonment, empathy, feeling his feeling of frustration at being trapped in his failing body, trapped with his young mind yearning for a body to match it, angry and powerless. Why does the body grow old just as the mind begins to learn to be young?
He saw a former self in me as I saw a future self in him. It scared us both, kept the rapid clock of sad age ticking.
