Fifty-Seven

Fifty-Seven. That’s what I label this post.  That must mean this is the fifty-seventh day of the year.  Time ticks along, shedding a second or a minute or an hour or a day at a time, moving inexorably toward the moment when the clock’s movement fails to move. Horologists would weep at the inevitable end of time, the moment at which there ceases to be anything to measure, anything to study. Reality suggests, though, there has never been anything worth measuring. It’s an illusion, a trick played on people who are long since dead, a joke that doesn’t matter in the end because, in the end, nothing matters. Somewhere, among the number of days in a year, the number of our  age at death is waiting. For some, it is fifty-seven. For others, eighty-nine. For still others, seventeen.  But once the number gets above one hundred, the reality of how much time we have starts to crumble into fantasy. No one has ever lived to three hundred sixty-five.  No one has lived to two hundred nine. But we count the days as if we could count on them.  No one has been able to keep counting them forever.