i forgot to do my daily calisthenics this morning,
when i stretch and do a few jumping jacks and squats so that my body knows
that it’s awake and hopefully won’t feel as old and creaky as my mind does sometimes,
like now, right at this very second, i feel the oldest i’ve ever been,
because i guess i am
Daniel tried remembering. He tried remembering the name of his daughter, what he had been doing for the past seventy years, how many times he had made love, and why he was forgetting everything.
It all looked like an unstable slow-motion sequence of images embalmed in layers of scotch being captured on a closed-circuit television camera without his knowledge. He kept on scratching at a glimmer of constancy without any luck, pondering over why he had so many chins.
Daniel concluded that everything was written in invisible ink on a post-it note.
Come on, grandpa,” he heard. “We can’t stay here forever.
I made a promise to myself that if I ever made it to eighty,
then I’d start using heroin,
not because I’ve ever tried it,
or even had the desire to,
but because I’ve always thought of myself as open to new experiences,
but I probably won’t tell my wife
Fred Aiken Writing 