Before and After

before & after before the meeting of “the one,” s/he had the clock ticking in his/her head--- tick tock tick tock & every day could be written down ahead of time, scripted like a horribly mundane & clichéd movie---one where the audience gets up & leaves or spends the time yelling at the screen. before, life had lost its flavor & the cruel realities of age had begun to creep into the face, carving deep lines that s/he couldn’t scrub off & that just wouldn’t budge when smeared with the most expensive anti-wrinkle cream s/he could find on the market. and then, oh then, the world seemed to flip right over, shining what appeared to be a warm comfortable spotlight on our tick tocking wretch---for s/he “had found the person that s/he’d always been looking for” & all of a sudden his/her world made sense, so down went the scriptwriting pen & a life of living in the moment, enjoying the perceived beauty of the present, engulfed the once tick-tocker. cut to after---because all “good” things come to an end, as they say: didn’t end through ****ing outside the happy dappy, didn’t end due to financial ruin on either part, no boredom had grown in the heads of either---fair to say they’d been ecstatic right up to the bitter end & the bitter end occurred when one got sick & the other didn’t. after, the one who didn’t get sick goes back to the script, back to the predictable, back to the tick tock tick tock, back to the mundane, the cliché, all with the notion that “the one” was just another that would leave them, regardless of their hopes, their dreams & a will to do differently.