Tilting Towards the Grave

How matchless and enviable are the seasons of youth, a phase of hormonal spikes rich with budding prospects! Leap when your vigour reaches a crescendo and your strength remains unabated.

Charm is embodied in the form of the young and grace trails the footsteps of damsels. So describe vitality to juveniles and etch on the surface of their hearts the reality of a fleeting period crammed with the tendency for reckless adventures.

I’ve searched the eyes of the young to find a world of unbridled mischief and the manners of untamed rascality. Therefore, give lads a pivotal moment to express their many unwritten quests and the drama of silly misdemeanours.

Hope is alive in identities dynamic in action, coursed with hot, uncorrupted blood. Joy is security while they sleep and they resume their unfinished exploits at the dawn of day. They teem with zest in all the circling of the clock and are flushed with real sensations.

Sorrows don’t congregate in the hearts of youngsters and neither do the devils of age draw any closer. Deception is free to whisper, but it does no harm to youths with a world of unexplored possibilities right ahead of them.

Decades down the line is like the descent into abysmal oceans—the light disperses, dims and shuts out into pitch darkness. Old age is weighty when it takes its toll on feeble bodies so a world of drab, utter blandness is sure to be the prevailing norm.

We embrace senility as an inescapable condition in a phase of life rich with tons and tons of discrete memories garnered from the running track of existence. Our progeny cluster by our bedside to perpetuate our genes and those unexpressed aspirations.

The fingers of infirmity are pleased to rattle this edifice that explains our mortality and we’re thrashed by the underrated scourge of unseen microbes. Our frame is conquered to the bed where we summon the silent footsteps of death from the netherworld.

The vision of our eyes is impaired, blurry from decades of sight and stained from the passing of many seasons. Never do we approve of the scrawny, saggy look of age or cherish a mirror precipitating unwanted visual nightmares.

The certainty of dying is sure as the bell tolls for our souls. We reckon death to be the chief of misfortunes receiving our spirits into its fatal, icy hands. Terror is sure to invade our frail, bodily frame so we quake violently tilting towards the grave.

© Valentine Nnebe 2025

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