Low scrim of sky. Small puddles, reflecting grey buildings, sky. An old woman walks down the street carrying her groceries. She thinks of herself in the past. Years quicken. Years pass. Years dissolve. We are made of the years. What a shame to have gotten old? Such was the way of things.
Some days, she hates the grey skies, the plain buildings of the city where she’s ending her life. Sometimes summer still blooms in her chest. Flowers still grow in her hair.
Was it really so long ago? Venice. The fetid smells. The labyrinth of streets. The rhythm of days somehow lost that summer in the past. The rhythm he keeps inside her. The sound of another couple just like them, doppelgangers perhaps, the steady drum beat of love making overhead.
But it’s all nonsense now, isn’t it? This love of her life, which she still sometimes feels more acutely than her string of days. But what else is there to do? She cleans a film of dust from the mirror, catches herself, is stunned yet again by the passage of time.
How had things ended that summer in Venice so long ago? Some silly fight of course. They had been too young; too impulsive. They’d thought they had their whole lives ahead of them. They thought there would be an endless splendor of days, of lovers, of those heady days of June.
Quiet streets. The low thrum of rain.
