forever_night ovenbird I am singing along to the chorus of “Futures” by Darlingside in the car. The chorus declares “it’s not ever too late.” I’m letting myself buy into this sentiment that I suspect is not based in fact. From the back seat my daughter says drily, “It’s too late when you’re dead.” Then she says, “I’m afraid to die.” When you have kids you are forced to unpack existential_dread on a regular basis. There’s no escaping it. You never know when a child will suddenly fixate on the idea that their life is finite. I sigh. “Aren’t we all,” I say, but compassionately, gently. I ask my son, who is in the front seat beside me, if he’s afraid of death. He says, “yeah” without inflection and goes back to watching a video on his phone. My daughter turns her fear over in her mind. “Well,” she says finally, “I didn’t exist for billions of years and didn’t mind” (she is parroting back a soothing tactic I’ve tried repeatedly to feed her and I realize that maybe it’s worked after all). “I don’t think we can care about anything when we’re dead,” I say and then admit that I’m a bit nervous about the getting dead part of the scenario. My daughter acts out death_throes from her booster seat, miming her heart stopping and her breath ceasing. She gasps a little and mentions the pain she expects to feel when her brain stops. I’m taking this in stride somehow. Darlingside is still singing “It’s not ever too, it’s not ever too, it’s not ever too late.” But my daughter has seen through the facade. It’s already later than I’d like. In a life that I once saw as an endless morning I’m surprised to find I’m already being called in for dinner. The streetlights will come on soon and it will be bedtime and my mother will be shouting my name into the gathering twilight. I’ll reach the kitchen door dirty and exhausted, but I’ll fight sleep as long as I can, negotiating one more chapter of a book, a glass of water, and possibly a snack. I hope the last thing I hear as I close my eyes is a soft voice singing “daisy, daisy tell me your answer do, I’m half crazy over the love of you.” I hope I meet the darkness in a wave of clean sheets that are allowed to billow over my body, held aloft by the breath of a small fan, before they slowly settle into the shape of my worn out limbs. I hope, as I watch the fireworks of my neural networks collapsing, I get to hold the hand of someone who has loved me. And a tiny part of me still hopes against all hope that there’s some unexpected dream in the stillness of that forever night that will allow me to find you, and that maybe, just maybe, it’s not too late after all. 250629 what's it to you? who go blather from