Continuity

Follow my explicit instructions when you notice me getting old. Please don't miss a step. I want you to see years in my spine, crooked and chinked from use, and I want you to find a decade between my brittle fingers, shrunken from pinpoint labor, and I want you to grasp at how long my eyes have in them, wrinkled at the corners from their continuous cross-hair tasks. When you discover my age, wipe it clean with your Windex of a knowing glance. See beneath the time wrapped into my skin, stretching farther than from here to Minneapolis. Read the small messages embedded in there.

Can you decipher them? They say that you're not as terrible as you think you are, and that you drive too fast, and that I'm really really sorry for picking you up late from that flight last October, but mostly sorry to myself because I wanted to see you so badly prior.

Know that when I get old I won't mind looking this way. Know that I'll only mind that I can't see you as well, or hear your lovely voice quite as clearly. Remember that when I'm slow to reach you, it's not for lack of trying but for lack of strength. Keep in mind that my scarred hands don't stop me from feeling how warm your eyes are during the holidays.

There's not a lot of time to say all this during a car crash, when our bones are fracturing from the screeching metal instead of old age. But I would have said it. I would have said it if our young lives weren't being cut so short.