Sometimes when I’m walking the trail in the early morning dark I’ll sense motion and realize there’s a large deer crossing my path. Dawn said there’s been coyotes attacking people in Bellevue and I should carry a cudgel. Maybe a 9 iron or the pepper grinder mom gave me that’s the size of a small baseball bat. Every day is life or death. If you’re not living you’re dying. I want to tell our kids this is your shot, the one life we get. Sure there may be others but not for the you you are now.

I got fond of the dim light in college, in Chris and Patrick’s apartment as the dusk set in and we sat in the dark playing music brooding. Now there’s no going back, I love the dark. It’s what I like most about walking in the early morning in the woods as the birds and frogs make little sounds, watching my legs swing from my hips, not altogether mine.

I went into the office, the agency I subcontract with. They give me a badge and access to most things even though I’m not an employee. It’s sad and dystopic being in a large, almost-empty space like that with snacks in the break room untouched, flat screens in the commons area streaming content from the Italian-based parent company, happy-looking Millennials giving testimonials about how great it is to work there. The loop is about three minutes long and repeats itself. I sit on the edge of the break room with my laptop and reading glasses and noise-canceling headphones hoping to see my friend who works there, one of the only people other than IT or the receptionist who still comes in. Now even the receptionist is gone.

My friend wants to leave, is hoping they’ll cut him a package. We’re the same age, he agrees it’s a question of life energy, only having so much, feeling it drain away. He’s always busy but I hope to catch him for a quick lunch and whenever we do it’s always deep. But the office is so empty you can hear the HVAC whistling, a giant metal lung. What it must cost to cool and heat all this empty space, all the high-end lighting and sleek furniture. Everything designed for people but no people to speak of. So I stand at the Scandinavian self-serve water cooler unit and grab a bag of potato chips and sit alone with the HVAC whistling like a slow-moving train. And remember back to what it was like working at the office pre-pandemic, when spring came and I’d take long walks.

Next week I go in for a pre-cancer treatment on my face where they put me under a blue light and sear my skin. I’m supposed to wear a wide-brimmed hat and stay away from direct light for a few days (no problem). I wasn’t thinking about cancer on my face but they found some when I went back in about my scalp. After the treatment I’ll get big pink spots on my face—they showed me a picture of others as evidence and it was hard to look at the way those pictures always are. Like the time I got diagnosed with geographic tongue and my dentist Googled it right there in the office and I was like ok, I get it, enough.

Almost to the minute the cat comes in our room at the same time every morning just past 5. He’s almost a year old now, somewhere between kitten and cat, maybe adolescent. Whatever stage he is for household pets life moves fast. I remind myself that when he’s driving me up a wall, his life is pretty dull. He only gets one shot too.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Errata, Memoir

Tags: aging, Creative Nonfiction, mindfulness, stream-of-consciousness