Sequestration

(This is an evolving story. I keep adding verses until I'm done.) When I was eighty-two, I went to live alone knowing the money would forever be coming. Going away felt appropriate for a man my age. The closest analog to the womb and to death. To be alive, clothed in the warmth of certainty amid my own unchallenged opinions during the age of ending, out of the business of a bright, moving planet my own part in the world outdated and roots severed. I found a place in the middle of the trees with a thin asphalt egress that made it easy to cycle to the village. I was surrounded by the aliens of the earth with their secret languages and concentrated lives. I truly lived among strangers, not those wanting to know me or able to know me. It was like the world before I opened my eyes. It was here and far away. Delivered here in a storm under which the taxi and me and the driver were as tiny as sugar molecules. The driver introduced himself as Charles. He is a black man from Aruba, Charles an English royal name. I ran to the door holding a newspaper on my head as Charles soaked himself carrying my black bags.