7. Tome
Rocking in a chair that does not, she looks back fondly upon her years that were spent dreading the future, mourning the past, and therefore, constantly spoiling the present.
First there was her childhood. Then there was her second childhood, the one when she really thought she had become an adult. Next there was her pre-adulthood, which is the stage that showed her she never knew what being an adult was like during her second childhood, but now that she was wiser, she looked forward to knowing in the near future. After that, there was her second pre-adulthood in which she spent nerve-racked, constantly looking over her shoulder, wondering when and where adulthood would hit, like an age bullet – a bullet constructed of age. Not-so-finally, there was adulthood. Then there were a series of additional adulthoods (second, third, fourth, fifth…), each one a melancholic reaction the one that preceded it, constructing embittered nostalgia for a time that was spent being bitter and nostalgic of another time. Eventually, she reached her post-adulthood, also known as pre-death, which is the stage she is in now.
But she does not dwell on these aspects, nor could she if she tried. Her mind’s eye is blind to most specifics, but can see numerous pretty, blurry images that stimulate confusing and exhilarating sensations that have all but been forgotten. She sometimes refers to these flickers as “the ghost light” – she adores the ghost light. She once made a wish upon the moon that each stage of her life would become a volume in an epic series of a highly-informative, leather-bound books, so that she could pore over every detail of her own existence and experience it all once more before she died. The series was to be called, The Complete and Unabridged Ghost Light.
She sometimes liked to speculate how the final tome would end.
“She, the most self-absorbed woman in the world, read the last sentence of her life: Now shut the book and die.”
lol