One Hundred and Sixty Six

Being told you're going to die shouldn't be anticlimactic, but dying ten years from now isn't near enough to be alarming. Neither is it far enough to be easily ignored.

I was a bit glum, but mostly because on the way home from the doctor's office I drove through the old neighborhood. 

I'd driven though it for the first time in decades last summer, and was awed by its beauty. The uncut grass was knee high and the abandoned houses were barely visible, engulfed in greenery like ruined temples in a rainforest. Sunlight flickering through leafy tree branches overhead reminded me of stained glass windows in a cathedral. I thought it was the perfect place in which to die, and vowed to come back when I was ready to kill myself. But this time the grass had been cut, and the houses looked bleak as disinterred corpses. 

Saddest of all, a car was parked in front of one of the houses with its hood up, and a man was working on it. Someone's living in this graveyard.