Inevitable Progression of Advanced Life Forms
Where they once saw you, illuminated, glowing, brazenly adapt at retrieving the life that had been given you and deploying it to every ounce of your love, spilling out of your retnas torch-like, your hands flowing gestures to articulate your every moment of emotion, flailing spitballs of amazing from your pen to the paper to the eye of the beholder; where they once saw you as immaculate, they’ll see you sitting watching football and channelling any energy that’s left into yelling at speakers that don’t care, the only light in your eyes that which is reflecting back at you the flashing images of Coke cans and the promise of low prices in high definition.
Where they read your words and promised you that you had a gift, they’ll now see the sweater you bought them for Valentine’s Day and wish they had gotten into the wine a bottle or two heavier. Where they once watched you fight and be fought, losing, trampled, broken glasses but gritting angry teeth and swinging back with the knowledge that you’re right, even if you aren’t powerful, they’ll now see you arguing with old men over leasing agreements or haggling with merchants trying to win back your pressure $13 and 95 cents worth of cell phone overages.
Where they once grew red, ripe and glowing under the sun, they’ll now see your tomatoes, after the first frost of Fall, unable to get any further than limp and green, hanging.
Where you once were, sitting proud in a slump of cold snow, homeless and writing poetry to the light of a final cigarette, now there is a man, chin folding over and staring blankly from his leather recliner. Luckily, he doesn’t have to hang around, he can be replaced by attempts to regain the control over your life that you so easily were animated with in youth. Unfortunately, aside from the easily dismissed mid-life crisis, he typically sticks tight to your lifestyle.
Up Next: Bike Pittsburgh