It took a walk through CVS to remind me that I will die someday. The medicine aisle was bad, but it was the skin care aisle that did it for me. I looked in the tiny mirror on the reading glasses rack and could see the wrinkles forming in the corners of my eyes. I felt them.

My skin soaked up the eight dollars, but I didn't feel any less mortal. I asked the CVS woman what I should do next to protect my skin from wrinkles.

You're so young, she said.

But that wasn't the question. She wouldn't know, wouldn't understand that every moment the sun slowly burns my skin cells, that I'm old, as old as I feel. And some days I can barely roll out of bed.

Some days.

Other days I can hardly walk, some days I can barely speak or smile or have the drive to think beyond tomorrow. Some people joke that I'm an old woman because I like to knit with my cats, other people say I have my entire life ahead of me.

I can dress up to go out. Put on my black tights and knee high boots and a strapless dress and hairspray my hair in curls so that I look the same for hours. This is how I hide my age, I'm young and sexy, come talk to me, drink with me, love me.

But when no one is around, the wrinkles come out. My face is pale and my bangs hang limp in my face as if I just walked through a freezing rain storm, lost on my way somewhere. I think about people I have lost. I think about myself and the spark I lost. The desire, the passion.

I'm in love right now. With what I won't say, but it's dying and I don't have the strength to revive it on my own. I'm the old woman on the bench waiting for the bus, the elderly man in the diner at 5 AM, waiting for his loved ones to come. But what I love is gone, and I am gone.

---Meredith