The nursing home

How did it come to this? I mean this of all things, someone up there must really hate me. There was a time when I had a house, bricks, roof even a garden. That time, was roughly 37 seconds ago. The futures arrived and now I’m homeless, what was once my home now looks like smoking bricks huddled in piles of 9 or 10. I’m smoking too, ash marks taking over my previously pale white skin. People come to help, the young idiots only make the situation worse, pulling off bricks and looking for me. But through the clouds of smothering black smoke they find nothing, no one is there to be found. I can’t believe this is happening, one week I lose her, the love of my life. The next I lose my house and any hope of things going back to normal. I guess I’m just another old man to fill up the streets.

I know how it came to this, the oven, I left it on. How could I do something so stupid? I never did anything like this when she was around, I used to be so careful, now look at me. I’m a mess now, both physically and mentally tolled as I lay in the clearing smoke. That’s right I’m still here, the oh so caring youth who came to help still haven’t figured out that they’re practically walking over a half dead man but never seeing him. Lily would have seen me, she always saw me even when I wasn’t around. Even when Lily began to forget everything else and everyone else she never forgot me not once. I almost forgot her though, for a second I couldn’t recall the feel of her smooth always soft hands. Only for a second and then it was though they were touching me again. They were colder than they used to be, but for love I could put up with that.

I don’t think anyone knows how it came to this. I can’t keep up, I know and then I don’t know. But God, it’s really frustrating. Finally the searchers have found me. Took them long enough. I can’t see them, but my slightly broken hearing aid picks up their crunching footsteps as they break what has already been broken. As soon as they touch me I no longer feel Lily comforting me, instead there’s clammy hands of young people. People who have barely experienced anything but still think they’re the best just because they found the old man hidden by smoke. I hear them as they speak, I hear their phones tapping away as they desperately call for help. There are a few words that catch my attention, theses idiots can’t find a pulse. Maybe they aren’t doing it right.

It’s come to this. Death, the thing that no one see’s or knows how it gets there, it’s just there. They were right, those people that come to help. They said there was no pulse and there wasn’t. I died but I felt nothing when it happened. I always thought I’d feel something, perhaps a feeling of disconnection, instead all feelings stopped and that was it. I used to be scared of death, but then I got older, way older. I was scared when Lily died, she never forgot me during dementia but I thought maybe death would finally pull us apart. I should have known that nothing, not even death could separate a love so pure. I stood, no longer homeless, I was in a nursing home, you may know it, they call it heaven.