Carpe Diem.

The room was thick with hot air, his lungs filling with traces of decay and fermented death. The sweetly sickening aroma crawled along the darkened hallways and into the fibres of his navy jumpsuit, leaving him irrationally uncomfortable.

Pulling the zip shut along the large black bag, he watched the teeth of the zipper clamp and hold, while his partner read out the credentials; the life of a man reduced to a few short sentences. “Age, 86. Widower. Cause of death, heart attack”. Hauling the damp weight of death onto the gurney, he couldn’t help but notice the faded photographs on the window sill; and the young man that beamed back in golden youth. The man in the frame seemed an irrevocably powerful version of the shell he now pushed through the hallway. Juvenile, raw and youthful, his future seemed a world away, and yet touching his fingertips at the same moment. His eventual demise was only a myth; a tale told to those who feared the deep end of the spectrum.

And yet, the only thing that stood between that moment in time, and the remains of an inevitable end, was a few short meters. It struck him that time was a great deceiver; that in three more days it would be another week. That 8 more weeks and it would be another year. That in a fleeting moment, he too would become nothing more than a faded photograph, on somebodies windowsill, left for dust.