Erosion: To Wear Away

This is the sickest feeling.

It's the loneliest thing I've ever known, the coldest, and the longest.

Ironic, too, because what I always had to fight for, what I always held above everything and everyone was my womanhood; shoved it in people's faces, made them respect it... and now it's helped to damn me.

Women live, on average, six years longer than the average man. Doesn't sound like much. Doesn't sound like it.

I didn't smoke, like Toby. I didn't drink like Leo. I didn't age thirty years inside of eight, like Jed. I didn't have a bounty on my head like Charlie. I wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time like Donna in Gaza, or like Josh on the plane. Oh god, how things happen. How things turn out.

When I first met Charlie he was nineteen and soft and dark and quiet, and I was already thirty-five and jaded. Now he's dead, and I'm still pulling myself along by my fingernails at eighty-seven, and it's not fair.

Sam was just a fresh-faced baby when we started, and he had held everything we hoped for inside of him, like a bright pearl, smooth and beautiful as he was and perfect and fracture less as a dream.

I always felt bitter and old next to Sam.

He died two months ago in his sleep. He was never a president. He sent me an email about three weeks before he died. He talked a lot about us, about America's dream team that they never even knew about. I could tell he felt the same way I did.

"What a life, I tell you." He wrote. "What a stupid, stupid life."

So now it's just me, on my own. Amy Gardner and I struck up a strange friendship after Sam's campaign flummoxed, and we talk sometimes, in the way that old women do-sporadically, with no memory if it had been a week or a day or a month since out last conversation. We tried so hard not to talk about the things that everyone expects you to talk about; nieces and nephews, in Amy's case, children and grandchildren. We circled through politics a few times, but it's hard to keep up when you're not a part. All the cogs keep spinning without you, and you never thought it could happen, and it's hard and confusing to bring into conversation.

So it's nieces and nephews and grandchildren and arthritis. Arthritis. Can you believe it? I can't. Now when we play cards it's not defiant, it's ancient and deep-rooted and forgotten and sad.

It's also a much smaller game.

I'm too old to make new friends. I'm too young not to need the old ones.

Erosion's a bitch.