Meeting a Friend

Meeting a Friend I met my old friend Joao at the pharmacist today a place we old ones go to buy medicine and to meet friends still alive, it occurred to me the pharmacy and the cemetery is only five minutes, walk away from each other. Joao had gone thin he used to be a house builder with a big muscular frame and now before me an old man who had lost his ready smile and a funny riposte to any argument. But I saw something else in his eyes, a dread, it was as he realised the finality of his life, a pleading to to nature that he was the one who escaped to the paradise island where the word death does not exist in the local language of the tribe who live there, but there was no succour; he had lost the battle.