This Spring has been lovely. Nice temperatures and varied green - the garden is just starting to fade with the lack of rainfall. In a few weeks, the sky will once again be loaded with ash and we'll no longer be able to keep the windows open at night.
Those of us who have not succumbed during the past year have been hunkered down, trying not to catch the attention of the virus, nor of those aggrieved yet entitled idiots insisting that it doesn't exit.
It is exhausting to remain mostly stationary. Energy levels wane. Ambitious intentions fail. Waistlines uncharacteristically expand. Parents diminish, then die.
One day during this, you wake up to realize that - shit - you're old.
Stuff hurts. The hurts persist. They migrate and mutate.
You try not to complain. When you finally have had enough, the effort to find a way out is overwhelming. Doctors are consulted, courses are taken, but relieve is elusive.
Is this how it ends? A decade's-long whimper?