Every Day Is A Day That You Will Have Once Been Young

A man lies on his deathbed, and in his existential agony, longs desperately for the days when he was young, full of vitality, energy, and optimism. He closes his eyes tightly and whispers into the approaching abyss: I would do anything to be young again. The abyss answers him. A phantom cloaked in dripping shadow abruptly appears and engulfs him without so much as a word, although the act is accompanied by the drowning wallow of every imagined hell.  

Poof. 

The man is again young. His skin is uncrumpled, plump and resilient. His long brunette hair dances before his eyes and obscures his vision. He’s surrounded by the walls and the people that he had come to know many decades before. He remembers not a thing from his elder perspective, is unaware of what had just happened, and inherits only the awareness that his younger self had once known. He knows not to appreciate the fact that his miraculous wish had been granted. He knows not to bless the sky nor the sun that drenches his days. He thinks not to relish unconditionally the blessing that it is to be living in the days that his elder mouth would describe longingly as the greatest of his life. 

The young man finds himself staring at his phone while reading a strange story about an old man wishing to be young again. He considered it convoluted and scrolls on without much of a thought. He puts his phone down and resumes the trivial work upon his desk, and from time to time, glances up at the calendar hung high on the wall and counts the months and years until the lazy river of retirement takes him downstream to days of greater ease.