WHAT SHALL WE DO TOMORROW?

I do not want to lie on that final bed – the one from one which neither you nor I will rise again – and find myself unable to shake this singular thought out of my head: ‘Dike, how would it have felt beneath your bare feet, the grass outside this window?’ You know? How everyone stays on ‘The Path’? I do not want to lie there thinking softly – Why did I stay on The Path? You know? How they wink at night, our flickering dreams? On and off, like fireflies, so people watching say you’re not…realistic, the way you go chasing after things that carry no guarantee of being caught.

What’s the point? I ask in return.

Of waking up? If the sun will only travel the same course, and set in the same place – what’s the point in waking up? Once, you see, I was a child. Now, I have one. And, soon, they will have theirs, and I would have become the grandfather vaguely remembered in the quaint features I only acquired in old age. Imagine it. To become a blurred picture, a somewhat familiar name at the root of someone else’s family tree. They will not know me. Just like I will never know them, no matter how many bottles of aromatic schnapps they empty on my behalf. Yes. When the sun will only travel the exact same course, and set in the exact same place – don’t you ever wonder – what’s the point?

It is true. I will not wait till I have reached that wicked bend where the road has grown too narrow to swing my wagon around. Tonight – with the back of my head nestled in overlapping palms, and Gloria Estefan on repeat singing about days of glory, those unforgettable moments when we stretch beyond breaking to reach for the skies – I’ll think these thoughts. These damned thoughts! Tell me. Why did I work so hard at a job I never liked; stay so long in a love I hated? Stand with hands behind my back, decades and decades, with words in me I never said back? Because – you see – there, at the tipping point of earthly life (no need to wait and see) time suddenly becomes what it’s always been – irreplaceable. And why did we waste it? Afraid of the dark. Why were we so afraid of the dark, when it only held all the things we had not yet discovered?

Why?

So, I sit up tonight and dare myself to think of tomorrow with courage and faith. Yes. Before it is lost, tell me, what shall I do with it – my strength? These arms? You know? They cannot be just for feeling my way cautiously, for laying firmly on the shoulders of the person in front of me, so I can be guided, exactly, into their tired tracks? Tell me – where shall we go with these legs? Before they need covering to keep from freezing. And time walks past – silent as a thief – on its way to that place from which it never returns? Yes. Before these hands begin to tremble so badly I am no longer able to hold your beautiful face between them? Tell me, my love, what shall we do tomorrow?

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