The old woman walks.
The centimeters she covers in her minor displacement of bones increase slower than most of the dawns you’ve seen passing by in an alcoholic silence and the rush of a new found love; the light they cast on the battered streets that smell of the cheapest kind of tobacco establishes itself as a feeling of endless movement in the heads of those who have got half a century to live ahead of them.
She is temporary, and her steps echo a waltz during the war, the song she’s written for herself to carry her mind to sleep when the time would come. She might have minutes, or she might have a decade to walk around memories as long as her legs still hold her spine against the world, and she’d never count the seconds, for a body that moves is a body in perfect shape. You need nothing other than your shell to expect a future. A shell and a terrible amount of bad luck to see your flesh survive laugh, tears and death, at times all together in a tide of pulmonary ache. And you need to be mad to outlive love: a lover, a husband, a child, while growing older by moments and moving to a timeless outline of metaphysics, it’s carcass, the memory.
She might be remembered by some, but memories tend to share the same coffin as their carriers, and they never burst into new forms of life as you’d expect the leftover seeds of wither to, but the idea comes to her the way flight comes to a bird. She had a century to learn how to die, you lose yours thinking of decades, when it may be hours. Hours left to spend time in an addictive manner, for life is nothing other than speed and flashes of feeling that get too bright to be remembered.
As she rests for a while, she might have minutes, she might have a decade. It’s all the same, it’s time. And it will reach for her slowly, leaving another wrinkle on her young rationality, the way it will reach me and you.
