Old Man

I saw an end in something else recently, but I didn’t finish it, it’s still a draft, it needs to be refined, you can only leave something when you’ve finished it properly, which is why we carry so much with us, so many things unfinished and evident with weight, another thought, another memory. I wonder what it’s like to be someone else, to remember differently, to think differently. The things I remember seem trivial most of the time, details are so easily lost, like being taken by the riptide, I don’t recall the way the man swam that brought me back to shore, I’ve lost that vital point, and now I may as well have surfed my way back for all I can tell.

We spend our lives refining our abilities, so we can wield some effect on the world, to find and possess the things we want, to destroy the things that are fatal to us and to protect the things we have that we want, we even refine the way we forget, the way to move on, which I guess is why, I’m still so overwhelmed by Terence dying, because, you think, for all my skill, my intelligence my influence and wealth, for every cent and every thought I’ve ever had, there’s nothing I could do, nothing I could use, to stop him dying. It just happened and I was witness, and that’s deeply frustrating.

Sometimes people say guys don’t talk about their feelings, particularly their negative ones, but, I don’t know, sometimes I think it’s more a way of protecting each other, however that may sound, because I think, often, why would I explain to someone, how devastating it was to watch my father slowly die in front of me over the course of a year, the details of that, why on earth would I want anyone to understand that sort of thing? I’d never, want someone, to have known that, you couldn’t, not if you cared for them. I know, that’s just one way of looking at it, but that’s the way I see it, I think to myself, how I miss the way his hands looked, or doing the word scramble, tiny, little irrelevant things, and they crush me emotionally, how could I explain to someone what my love for him is like, if something as small as that just overwhelms me?