The Close

At the start of this I asked you a question and told you it wasn’t rhetorical. We’ve done the work since – the drawer that swallows anything past a thousand, the weeks that renew until nothing costs you, the month that finally holds still, the math on your own life, the computer folder with a bottom you can see. So I’ll ask it again. This time you have everything you need to answer it honestly.

Can you feel it?

I can’t answer that for you, and I won’t try. On page one the number was a throwaway line in the climactic finale of a TV series – the average person’s, somebody else’s, a fact you nodded at and carried off to bed. It isn’t that now. It’s a folder on your laptop. A count in your own handwriting. A stack of empty files shorter than the photos from one good week. The grid that started clean is mostly grey for some of you, and the white that’s left is the whole of it.

That’s all it is – the number, finally the right size to hold. Not a tragedy. Not a verdict. The thing you couldn’t feel on page one, sitting still long enough now to be felt.

And it won’t just sit there. From here on, every yes you give is weighed against it. So is every no – whether you do the weighing or not.

I’m not going to tell you to seize the day. The day was never the unit – that was the whole point.

You have a few hundred months. You can see them now.

The cursor is blinking in this one.