TIMELINES
The night sang like a trance, its banshee voice raising eerie goosebumps on the cockles of my heart.
He is still dead. Permanently dead. Ever since the phone call at 6.
He had waited for more slices of time and space than what was available on the time list of fate, or, in the work-and-inertia-infested schedules of our routine existence,
But waiting is a sly enabler of expectations with a bad habit of distributing hope even where none should exist.
The eye water pooling inside my mask reflected the canceled trips over the years, canceled for reasons more frivolous than I can remember.
His watch, glasses, nebulizer, files, prescriptions neatly lined next to his wallet, silent sentinels of a brave king. He had kept his funeral photo stacked neatly on top of his wife’s; no one should have to be worried on his account.
You wouldn’t know he was 84, his brand-new tangerine t-shirt and his favorite cream pants talked of a man with hope and fight. Of course, he had no idea that hope may run out like the oxygen in his damaged lungs and waiting to see me get married might be a consolatory way to fit life 2X into his own timeline.
Timelines are such twisted things, snakes of fate sending unsuspecting players down the ladders of oblivion.
They told us he had stopped to look at two things before he left…the house, and the wife-my granny. Did he mean you were my home? Or that my home and your home will be different from today?
Funerals are for the living, they say. Because they are the ones who stay behind picking up memory shards from the cyclone of time.
