The Highwayman Come Riding

His great-grandmother is getting a doctorate in Japanese literature. Granddaughter's great-granddaughter is renewing her marriage to Marjaana Leskinen.

Sister now works as a sewage engineer in Buenos Aires. My aunt is on holiday in Manila.

One woman whose name I do not even know has written a book of poetry. Cousin? Nephew? Or a lover or wife of a distant relationship? (In my life I smile and shake hands with lots of lovers and couples and somehow I have kept in touch with them all, our second links build respect but continued for the same reason after separation or divorce, hanging sometimes for centuries like a rotten ice shelf stuck on a riverbank after water fallen, he can carry any load but it does not break until he is tested.)

Or is this woman just a problem on the social network, the wrong name, the wrong click - a stranger who accidentally encountered my feed?

In any case, it is good to know that life goes on. Good - or maybe annoying.

I read twelve books of poetry in the last century, and I lied about reading the other twelve. I am suddenly convinced that I could not quote a line from any of them. . they can be called a poet if they want to, and indeed their verse would not be worse than those old pieces of doggerel from the treasures of childhood somehow successfully succeeded in my mind countless past eons and still rise uninvited and unexpected as the big criminals come - ride - ride - like travelers of the highways, as far as the ancient entrance to the inn.)

But this new book, written by anyone - there will be no need to read it now, no need to pretend I did it.

Carla is my caseworker. He speaks well and is a good hologram, but he will never be the Face of Man for a Thousand Years. Even the Face of a Century Man. (Not that he would care or know what that meant, because if I ever let the case slip in he would just weave his brows with a question and draw his legs under his body bent in a rattan chair, curious, not stumbling, not even seeing the nature of the comment, but just curious in my name as I am interested in a piece of puzzle unexpectedly released under the bed, eager to see where it goes.)

I would explain that the Face of the Millennium. Given enough time, given enough communication with enough people, we were all sure we were something to someone, in the end. (Not eternal, not real, I don't mean, because real things are always so messy that they can last.)

But a thousand years from now, a good traveler who had passed just once, who blinked for a while and would no longer exist, had simply bound himself to his bed and said, "My God, I still remember his face!"

My face, yes. And why not?

After all, everyone in the face of another millennium - or I always believed, until I saw Carla. The face of Five Days, if ever. `Flat frame of the remaining size, dull in their familiarity and bland in their harmony.)

The faces that would have been witches and attracted to these men, I suddenly remember - a face like my last wall — the duchess — painted on the wall.

And a cute and hologram chatbot is great! How absurd to continue to hold on to their will as a rod after all this time, how unreasonable to forget the compliments they once murmured in the dark!

"I'm here," said Carla, "to help you accept what's going on, and to help you find what you want in this process."

I wrap my hands around my thighs and stare at them, in the strange twists that have just become. (I do not remember my wife's hands - my active hands, my loving hands, my daily invisible hands - my daughter's hands only, swollen and very thin wrists, uncomfortable and soft with growing pains, carrying chewed nails and cut cabbage and neat hairy rows in the back, like a garden sprouting wheat--)

But now my skin is getting thinner and thicker, my veins are green and cold around the thick buttons of my spears. They are the hands of a stranger, a body of flesh, of dishonor and tenderness in various ways.

Is Carla old enough to remember the men we left behind, I wonder? Men who have gone through life, repeated, shaken, and so on - until they are just dots on a running highway, raindrops in the fast air?

Finally, we said, 'Enough, sisters! and I saw the cruelty of continuing to give birth to them, their short seventy and ten years of life, while we - their mothers and sisters and their loved ones and their daughters - continued to grow ever, forever and ever, never to grow old or fail or die. (I can sing the list of men I know in my life, they are all gone - but no, I better remember one maybe, my last son who grew up to be one of the last men, a child of my hundreds Life middle-aged, who once fell hard from an apple tree and disappeared behind a pile of wood as I ran across in the yard, my face looked frightened, though the fall was not the worst, not even life, yet it caused a rapidly growing lump in my chest when I suddenly saw his whole life rush past me as he fell, running so fast that it would have gone before I grabbed him.)

Knowing what would happen and what it would mean, was it any wonder that we would eventually be unable to carry them?

“Some people find peace or meaning in their last days,” Carla said. "Some people value death."

I wonder who these people are. Do they appreciate areas of the liver, thin hair, painful joints? Do they appreciate the incontinence and the coughed cough at night? Peaches I can eat. fantasies, concerning the formal passing of time.)

But what about the greatest anger? Do they also appreciate the slow decline in response to a list of diseases, a growing catalog of chronic complaints? Do they appreciate the growing anxiety about their body's failure, as engaging and inevitable as any other natural thought?

So we let them all blink one by one at night - those elderly fathers and brothers and their loved ones and sons, who did nothing but complain and complain and remember the vanity of their youth. 'after my death, everyone will die without almost being near me!)

My hair is gray, but not aged, and it hasn't been white overnight--

That's enough.

Granny is taking part in a shooting game at the Olympics again this year. Niece plays piano at Carnegie Hall.

The daughter has discovered a new type of deep-sea arthropod. Does Mom wonder why I didn’t reply to the email or send an update years ago?

And I'm dying from a rare degenerative disease called aging, which is nothing more than the protection of our longevity. Self-defense can be part of the genes and can kill grandma and mom and daughter and niece and the same day, or that could be different for my family to me.

"You've lived a good life," Carla said. "And you have passed your grandchildren over thousands of years."

Yes, that's all I can say. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

Some had never used drugs at all - those old women who could not bear to watch their husbands wither and die while sailing peacefully in their youth and strength. But not me.

In fact, I could not commit to the men I knew - in their estimation, in their personal life. I felt sorry for them, so I stayed, cared for them, and helped them pass. And after that, I lived a hundred more lives.

I could not deny life.

I would not accept death.

But we were all still very young at that time. We are all still around our first date. I don't know if there is enough gravity now that it can bring anyone back when I call. From Buenos Aires or Manila, Olympic Village or the Mariana Trench - can I bring to my side a sister I have never met in a hundred years, or a granddaughter whose forgotten face?

(Will they remember me when I ask them, or will they look confused at their food, wondering who this sweet-dying woman with a name they don't know, this anonymous striker who is breaking their peace, this geneticist who is genetically unacceptable and asks:

when will we meet again

Thunder, lightning, or rain?)

Will they call each other, after years of not talking, and ask who I am, and what web relationships bind us all to? Will they count generations and be removed once, counting whether they will be their right to just ignore me?

Because to help me now - would that mean a peaceful reception, a silent agreement, a silent oath that it may not be theirs forever? That their bodies are one day too - (Nothing, nothing, just a cough I can't move - just curling my back to sleep on the couch - I've always been dizzy, even a very young girl - oh but please close the door, I'm getting so cold with this fix!)

I apologize now for calling Carla on the face for five days. I will not revive the memory of anyone for a thousand, or a hundred, or even ten years from now. Maybe five days was the only thing I had to plan for.

"The memory is good," Carla said as I tried to reason with her about how long she would remember me. "But that's for the living survivors, for the people you leave behind."

I'm moving on, "said Carla. I don't have to worry about that. The only thing I have to worry about is making my remaining time run away from me.

The only thing I have to worry about is staying, reaching out, growing up. Life is about life, not about memory.

Or something like that. That's something I'm crying about.

Then I grabbed my hands in his arms, my arthritic hands with burning ring around each knot, with weak and aching muscles. Then I close my trembling eyebrows in the afternoon sun, and dive into that darkness watching, sitting there for a long time, wondering, scared--

Doubt--

Dreaming--

Dreams that no one has ever dreamed of before -