The gift of years is heavy, not light,
For friends fall away like doves in flight.
I carry their songs in silence, alone,
Fortune’s burden is mine to own.
Longevity carries two hidden companions. The first is burden: the vertical weight, the gravity of continuing. To live on is to become custodian of shared memories, a keeper of voices now absent. The second is loneliness: the horizontal emptiness, the thinning of one’s cohort across time. Each friend lost is not merely a person gone, but a dimension erased — a perspective no longer available for reminiscence, for the gentle work of recalling life together.
We once laughed at a television show that announced, “There is nothing wrong with your set. We control the horizontal. We control the vertical.” As children, the line was eerie. Now, with age, it becomes strangely apt. The vertical is the burden we feel pressing down upon us — the accumulated weight of survival and remembrance. The horizontal is the loneliness stretching outward — the empty chairs, the vanishing faces, the friends no longer present to share the old songs.
Together, they form a cross. On it the fortunate survivor hangs, not in martyrdom, but in the quiet trial of solitude. The geometry is stark: downward weight, outward absence. Yet in this structure there is also dignity. To endure the vertical and the horizontal is to affirm that life, even stripped of peers, still commands presence.
To carry on is not a failure but a form of service. It is a paradox of fortune: to be granted years, and to feel their weight. The clock of brine ticks on, and the survivor stands — a little more solitary, a little more burdened, but still attentive to the world, still dancing in his own improbable way.