42

The day before I turned 42 I had my second talk with death, this time it was different, this time she came in because I invited her inside, and she left because she saw no worth in the effort of staying. For a brief spell the fierce heat of the epilogue ran through me, some believe the last light comes with a spell of frost, but that belief is born of ignorance, my experience in this matter, repeated experience at that, allows me to state that one reaches the end flushed with heat, one returns to the center of the earth from the center of the body: from the stomach a gust of fire begins to spread, and it halts at the knees, at the elbows and at the mouth. It was after a rite to gluttony, followed by a surrender to sloth, that my lips began to dry and the tinnitus to suffocate; as I discovered the feeling, the panic of memory paralyzed time and life began to play again, from the very beginning, preparing to surrender itself to the close. It was something I “saw coming” or, in truth, “had been looking for”; the final stretch had been defined, all of it, by a systemic imposition of decay upon my own being, a perpetual choosing of the shortcut to unconsciousness, a marked acceleration toward the abyss. But, as always happens to the coward, in the last second before experiencing the definitive permanence, I repented of the effect and wept for the cause; anguish presented herself in her icy nakedness, weary of seeing me again but hoping to, once and for all, lose. Every flaccid muscle of my depressing humanity tensed as far as gelatin can tense, and I slept, I slept noisily and fitfully, but at least I slept. The next day, already accepting the old age empirically imposed on me, I told myself once more: “Never again”… and began again.