Once in a while I like to wonder if you will be with me forever. If you will look up at me in the silence of so many words. In a place where time does not move. In a place where death can never find us. But today, you are aging. Your body aches, slowing your strides to an inch at a time. An inch at a time. You are forgetting. I've memorized the rise and falls of your breathing. So when I stoop into your sudden silence, I will know what should and shouldn't be there... I shouldn't... ...wonder what you will smell like when you are gone. If you will smell like all the elderly family members, wrapped up in their hospital beds. Like something stagnant and clinically unlike you. Or worse. If you will smell like nothing. Nothing at all. ...tonight you are lying on my bedside, snoring as old people do. And I am crying, so foolishly crying, over an old dog who is much too tired to wonder.