This Numerical Life

This (Numerical) Life I am a number. I know this because you spend all evening asking me my age, as it is my birthday and we dine in lavish style. My name is forgotten; the eccentricities of my character fade, the memories of long conversations disappear, I am reduced to a question: “How old are you”. And when I do not answer then the guessing games begin, with shrewd examination of my wrinkles and thinning grey hair, and cautious estimates so as not to offend. But still I resist, and your desperation grows, the number taking on significance beyond its simple fact. I am a number, or you would have it so; to be referred to thus “You are old, Father Clapham”. But I am me, that sometimes disinhibited gentle man, who talks with you and not at you, who can sometimes cut elegant flourishes in the air with words, and who makes no demands, but relishes your company and sometimes moments of surprise…. And if I were to tell my age, what then? Would you categorise me, change your “maybes” to “shoulds”, whether they could apply to me or not. Will possibilities, however improbable, transform to impossibilities when I become a number? Will you say “…but at your age” and consign me to a scrapheap? Do you seek to know how long we might have together, before I can be cast aside as worthless, toothless, sexless? And may I then know how long you have? Is it the brief months before the inherited disorder strikes you down? Or the long drawn out death from cancer, but well before your allotted span? I am not a number: I am me, this gentle man who thinks not of the passage of time, nor dwells in history, but is mindful of the present and eager to explore the future. And you, how old are you? Not in birthdays, but in the stale pathways of your thoughts, that show that some can be a long time dead when they’re living.