with the time you have left

It's up to me to do what I will with the time I have left. My grandparents have been to something like ten funerals in the last month. They have lost 35 friends in the last year. They are 80 and 83 years old. They are still travelling, they are still planning a cruise to Norway, my Grandpa still drives across half the country once a year. To me, them dying is far away. They are the only grandparents I've ever gotten to know - my brother and I are their only grandchildren. Mortality is a frightening concept to think closely about. It is like repeating a word over and over again - the experience of repeating the sounds overwhelming the small, unimportant word. So I think and think about death and when it's coming and how it's going to be and it's scary. It's really frightening. My grandparents used to have a nice group of ten best friends. Only one lady and them are left. I read an article today in a local paper about the little sister of a friend. At 3:03 pm on March 3, 2003, she was in a really horrible accident. She was in the hospital for 28 days and her condition was on and off, she was going to die, she was going to survive. She was 5 years old at the time. I didn't know this. And all of a sudden - this little baby I used to know, who ran around the ice rink, was in a head-on collision and close to death. I didn't even know.

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' waits for me at my bedside. My bed beckons to me all day long. I lay here with the sun streaming through the window and everything else gets lost. I can't be bothered about housing or a job or anything difficult though I know I need to deal with it. My comfort lies in sleeping, reading, curling up with my cats, curling up with the laptop, running errands and eating lunch with my mom. Tomorrow I will look for jobs, maybe. Tomorrow I will write the letters my dad wants me to write - I doubt I'm going to get the job back that I had last summer, sweet as it was, as much as they loved me.

Tomorrow night my family will eat pizza and watch British mysteries. Tomorrow night I wonder what I will have accomplished tomorrow.