left behind

I really wish I could believe in an afterlife. I wish you weren’t gone.
I am disgusted with the world, with how people just die.

And so I thought of him as a young boy, writing down his name. I just kept writing his name down. That old man, not unlike my own grand father.

I had received a text message from my friend, my phone had buzzed with sanguine vivacity, just as the door had been closed, just as my mother had left the room, she had told me.

That reconciliation of life and death.

The chirpy message from a friend wanting to go out. Myself at my desk, surrounded by papers, all day wishing the day would pass; the study to end.

The thought of the demise of all around me. Of my own. Sitting here, the knowledge of the fun to had, of the immediate gratification of a night out with friends. Then of slow tedium, that lugubrious plodding through the aisles of study, towards a boring albeit more sustainable gratification.
The knowledge that what ever was chosen, what ever was done, what ever said, whatever sought, would end.

There was Guiseppe. A quiet man. A kind man. I had only known him in his old age, from my birth till my twentieth year. He was always old. I remember him as old. But not as dying. I hadn’t that misfortune of seeing him in his final stages of decreptitude. I had heard he had been placed in palliative care. That vulgar apparatus of death.