i've been sleeping so strange

obit:

He had long outlived the end and realized beyond the end was not another beginning but a long journey back to moments of unaging, of becoming innocent again, of falling in love with those he’d forgotten, of learning to ignore death, of being born again and again to the point his shoulders stooped from the effort of attempting to understand how new the old can be. Soon he recognized an urging in the reversal of time to consider how scared and broken he’d been his whole life. The sensations of worry, fear, loneliness, thirst came before the cause of these emotions and he often found himself unable to remember and he was suddenly seated in the corner of a strange room far too big for him wondering where the tears and the shivering had come from. And then he knew, but there is no moment of solace in the journey back.

He stood before the crowd and bowed. His mother and father clapped from the fifth row of the theater. His wife sat in the garden watching the movement of this hands on the piano through the window. The song played in reverse. The horrors and the twisted architecture of the composition were more pronounced in this order. He kissed his friends and he kissed his lovers. He cried. He came to the window and saw, in his reflection, the wound close up. He pressed his hands into the glass and spoke to the young man and remembered a time in his life when he had spotted someone so old but familiar in this same window.

What had he done? What will I do? “We are going our different ways. You to the end and I to the start.”

He remembered now why he cried. But the moment passed just as painfully as it arrived and he stood before the door ready to enter.