WARNING: Fic was basically inspired by Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall's 25-year age difference... so... YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

If you'd told me when I was nineteen that somewhere between forty-four and dying alone I'd fall in love with a nineteen-year-old girl—a nineteen-year-old girl—well. I'm so far down this sewer that my nineteens seem like my eighteens and my sixteens and my twenty-fucking-fives so fuck if I remember what I would've told you. But I'm fairly certain I would've sent you straight back to your grandmother in heaven hanging by the skin of your balls. Yeah, I've fucked up more than my share of things, and that won't stop just because I'm dying. But hell if I thought I'd ever find myself here rubbing my right hand off like a twelve-year-old boy with an internet connection because some baby girl isn't giving it to me. Moody bitch. God she's hot.

No, you tell me. Who the fuck expects to find themselves like this? You either know it'll happen 'cause you're a fuckin' sicko or you know it won't happen 'cause you're a different kind of fuckin' sicko. Either way. Don't give me that age-is-a-number bullshit because age is not just a fuckin' number, you hear me? But that's not the point, you hear me? You won't understand until you're leaning back on your bed rubbing off to that tight little body, that sweet little scowl. She's so beautiful and so young. I love her. I fucking love her.

I shouldn't have divorced Petra.

But life happens and you never know where on the Z-distribution it's going to hurl you next. I'd say I've had some experience crash-landing and peeling myself off the tarmac. Age-is-a-number but at this rate if the world doesn't kill me in five years then I'll kill myself from all my years of vice. Cancer, lungs, you know it better than I do. Funny how old age wasn't a vice until I met her.

I love her.

Does she love me? Yes, no, it doesn't matter. You'll understand if you ever get to where I am. Age is not a number. Age is dying and dying from the inside-out and mistakes and new mistakes and losing and gaining and losing again again again and thinking nothing will ever hurt you like you're young because you're not young again but it catches you by surprise, it always catches you by surprise. You're not invulnerable. You're dying.

I love her.

Whether she loves me or hates me I'll die. I'll die because I've found life in her and in the end life must die. And she'll die, too, but she'll live, grow, beautiful, strong, hurting, loving, forgetting me. I love her. I love her either way all ways always.

I think she's too young to understand.

But on the days I walk away from her she looks at me like it doesn't matter, like I'm the sky that holds her stars and she only has to close her eyes to find me.

I want to tell her I'm dying.

I think she knows.

One day she'll forget me and the world will forget us. The truth is I'll never get used to the truth. I love her and it consumes me and to what end will the fight have been for, then?

I love the curve of her frown. I love the smell of her hair, the way it catches rays of sun that peek through the curtains of our room. I love the colors of her beautiful mind. I love the edges of her name as they catch in my tongue, in my breath. Mi-ka-sa. I-love-you.

Marry me. I want to say it. I want to kiss it into dip of her neck, wrap it tight in her fraying scarf. But she has a life and a world ahead of her—one far, far richer than the few short years I could give.

I love her too much to take it from her.

That's a lie.

It'll only be a few years. Please. I promise. Please.

Please.

Forget me.

She's nineteen and I'm forty-four and I love her like the setting sun.