Future

Everything will end, everything we know will one day cease to exist, everything has it's time, which is finite. Nothing, and I mean nothing, lasts forever, even the memories of us when we are long gone, will one day drift off into the distance, until they become so small and unrecognisable by anyone.

At that thought, I touched the chair, the cat, my skin and I sniffed at the air just to remember what it smells like. All of this, one day...

…will be gone. Every last thing I can see. Including me.

I stick out my leg and touch my toes, and think about the time when all this goes.

The stretch in the back of my thigh, making me feel like I want to die,

shows me that this is all very much real, and with extermination I don’t have to deal, not today, as they say, not today. 

But one day, maybe it will be me, and maybe not. Maybe by that time, my last days I will have got, and I’ll no longer even be a jot, a blip, a candy tip, you know, the size of a sugar grain, no blame, I’ll be gone, somewhere where the end of the world won’t reach, a speck of sand on a beach, a waft of dust, as such.

I look at the palm of my hand. I watch the creases there and think they are grand. Papery skin, the folds do get in. Some people read them and tell me my life story. Can those palm readers tell me when all of this will be over? Are they that clever? Whatever? Who can see the future? Do we even want to know? Ignorance. Bliss.

I look up at the tressure that is the blue sky? I wonder when that will die? The birds and the bees? The great ocean seas? What will take their place? Empty space? Will the seas empty out into the universe? Like Earth has sprung a leak. Can you imagine the sky above, delete, just that checked pattern where it used to be. The dry valleys of the oceans like open landfill once the water is gone?

Or would it just be us? The weakest, but most destructive link? Flesh and bone first to sink. Then it would just be evidence of us having been? Something obscene? Before, it too, would be gone. What would be beyond? The cold winds of time, blowing across the land, before big bang in reverse. A lot of sucking noise, like an enormous inhale, then black, on a miniature scale. Minute, is what we are saying.

You could pick it up and slip the whole universe in your pocket, at that moment, except there would be no you, pocket, or not, and it would be too heavy anyway, I presume. If it let out a yodel at that very moment, it would be the very embodiment of that fat lady, don’t you think.

I, for one, hope that is the way it goes? In the end.