Hands

I looked down while I was typing earlier, startled by my own hands. The finger that has begun to click with arthritis. The skin, puckered as a flat of dried mud on a hot summer day. The veins, unashamedly risen to the surface.

My hands are like the prompt on my Outlook calendar, an insistent reminder that I am nearly a half century old. That the final deadline continues to draw nearer. And that at some point, I will no longer be able to dismiss what my heart made clear to me months ago. I need to be more than a recurring meeting on another's schedule. I want to spend the rest of my years as someone's only.