Tracing The Line
A meditation on mortality, inequity, and the illusion of choice.
H had become a watcher of graphs. “It helps,” he told me, “to see time drawn.”
H showed me the chart he had taped on the refrigerator, beside a fading postcard of Santorini. The postcard had yellowed in the sun, its ink blurred by the moisture clinging to our small house at the edge of the town. The line traced from one corner to the next — a descent — not abrupt, but steady, like a river turning to mist. I studied the line. It had the elegance of inevitability. A slow descent pretending to be natural.
“We all have our paths,” I said.
“But do we choose them wisely?” H asked, and I saw the weariness behind his question.
Bread sat uncut on the counter. Outside, the wind rustled the leaves like whispers from an unseen teacher. I had come to break bread. Instead, H invited me to sit.
“We labor,” he said, “we feed the fire of this machine — and then it forgets us.”
“I thought money would help us stay above it,” he said. “But the line doesn’t really care.”
“You think we’d live longer — elsewhere?” I asked.
“In other lands, across the ocean,” he said, “the line is longer, yes. Because the burden is different.”
I nodded, as if recalling a lesson from long ago.
“Will geography really make a difference?” I asked.
“Even the rich die earlier here,” H told me. “That’s what the article says.”
The line sloped like a hill from my childhood. A hill I once rolled down until I vomited on my shoes.
“You think we’ll ever beat the line?” I asked.
H shook his head.
“I think about that more than I should,” he said. “I think the line already knows our names.”
It was not fear I saw in his eyes, but a kind of reverence for deciphering the pattern, for the decline, for knowing. I wanted to offer something comforting, but he was in a place my words couldn’t reach.
Later, as I walked through the frozen orchard outside our home, I thought of the line. The sky was quiet.
Snow gathered in my footprints, erasing them one by one.
Real headlines that vaguely resemble today’s fiction:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/america-europe-wealth-death-rate-b2730818.html
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