Followed She walks with me on the coast, storm howling with rain driven sideways, pattering madly on my hooded coat, just outside my peripheral sight. She sits, somehow behind me, while I watch the sun setting over the Pacific and the moon rising above the hills in the east. She murmurs, nearly silent, when I sit with my granddaughter by my side, telling stories of wonder or history of lives within our family. I almost saw her once in the morning when I was shaving: I looked up into the mirror and I was certain I saw her there before I was distracted by the changes in my face, the etchings at work by Time. Take heed, please, for her presence is relentless and indifferent to either hope or desire, and she is fair, entirely fair, if, at least as I see it, a bit cruel. Take heed and live this day fully because sometimes she taps you on the shoulder to collect your soul long before you ever imagined it might happen.
