Thank you @mariannewest for another fabulous #freewrite challenge, today's prompt is health
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He is old. At least he feels it, often. Sometimes he still thinks he is twenty, but his body tells him otherwise.
He has little to show for his seven decades on this earth. He doesn't have two pennies to rub together. Why he would want to rub them together he does not know. Would they mate? Produce little monetary offspring, perhaps?
At least he has his health. Such as it is. He is not particularly well off in that department either. But he is still breathing, so that is an advantage he has over many of the people he worked with, the ones who succumbed to the cancer of the lungs. He wonders what made him immune to that disease, and others. He has outlived most of his friends and nearly all of his family.
Unless you count his brothers children. And you'd have trouble counting them all. They breed like fucking rats. But unlike rats, he never sees them. They avoid him, and he avoids them. It is an arrangement that works for everyone. He coughs and his back hurts. He stands up and stretches and then sits again.
...
Picture is a selfie I took just now and then prisma'd it.
I love what you've done with that selfie - it wouldn't look out of place as a high end album cover!
I wonder why people often become so curmudgeonly in their old age. Is it because they watch so many of their loved ones pass before them, or the world changes and grows, seemingly without them? Who knows. Your piece provides a lucid insight into one of those sad souls. Though clearly he's still got a bit of spark left in him :)
Looking forward to more of your small tales.
I'm forty eight, and I can feel it creeping up on me (the picture probably isn't the only bit of "selfie" in the piece)! Part of it is that things start to hurt more, so your temper gets frayed more easily, I guess, and also you have less time for people's BS. I have a good friend who has just turned 70 and his motto is "Everyone is a bastard, until they prove otherwise" (by the way he doesn't live by that rule! He is a really nice and helpful guy..
The selfie was taken in poor light and then I used the 'femme' setting on prisma to make it look more arty
I think your codger needs a name 😀
This sounds so genuine. I love they breed like rats!
To be relatively healthy at that age would be amazing.