The Record: Moves

Jen and I text late at night. We talk about how fun it would be to be neighbors, how we would dance on the corner together, scaring the neighborhood.

I almost say that we should plan on it, being neighbors, when we get old.

But then I realize that I might not be getting old at all.

I want to tell her this. But I don’t.

Today, I realize that the tremors I’ve been feeling in my hands have actually gotten quite bad.

I squeeze a juice bottle in the kitchen, and my whole hand shakes uncontrollably.

I stretch out my fingers, and the middle and ring fingers have lives of their own.

I try to write an address on a package, and I can’t get the pen to go where I need it to.

It’s these things that worry me.

New treatments all the time. Isn’t it amazing.

Five years. Ten years. Fifteen years. But that only gets me to sixty.

I’m not supposed to die at sixty. I’m supposed to hike the John Muir Trail when I’m sixty.

Right now, I can barely make it up the stairs without losing my breath. At the hospital, I wait longer for the elevator that takes me up the extra floor.

It’s too early in my life to be making any sort of peace with death, and I don’t follow any god’s doctrine. The closest thing I have to a bible is a book about past and future lives.

I don’t believe what Stephen Hawking said, though. There is something out there.

Or, if we really do just go black, in that case I guess I won’t know either way.

Jen and I are gonna need to start scoping out neighborhoods before it’s too late.