Were you a nightmare

It's a funny thing coming to the end of your holiday. All the memories that you packed into your journey, all the friends you made, all the things you might have done but never quite got around to are behind you as you pull up to the front door.
Life is a bit like that and as your train nears the end of the line, as the buildings begin to build up and the train begins to slow and creak a bit, as it sways over the junctions, now entering a tunnel briefly out into the sunshine before plunging back into darkness.
The other passengers get up out of their seats and lift down their luggage, for them this station is but a pause in their journey. You stay anchored to your seat the ticket in your hand says cancelled, the clips around the edge show its carried you on many journeys but now this is the last one and there, down the end of the platform is the attendant waiting patiently.
It only seems like yesterday when you set off on your first trip down the garden path to the delight of your parents. Then the trip to your first school and a new world, soon followed by your first job and the first holiday away on your own. All these firsts. Living away, moving overseas, walking down the aisle and then the magic moment of your first child and the second with their first of many firsts.
Suddenly these firsts begin to dry up, suddenly there are no more events no more firsts and slowly even the days seem to slow into a meaningless montage with time itself becoming  a continuum without signposts without any sense of order other than the comfort of sleep.
As the obituaries fill the airways each morning praising the life of so and so after their death you notice the dates recording their life span are all around you like dandruff on your shoulder they reflect your own span and when Mr Blank died in his sleep after a short illness at age 75 you realise how precarious this business of living has become.
Waking and looking around the bedroom on this, a new day one is struck by the sameness of the previous day and the uniqueness that each new day has. Does one grasp each minute as precious and go out early to respond to the fact that you are alive, or do you simply acknowledge the uncomfortable truth by putting it into the back of your mind, filling the day as you did the previous day with trivia.

Faced with ones mortality perhaps the worst thing to do is to become hyperactive about it and rather shorten the periods you find yourself out of bed. The cowboy dies in the saddle with his boots on, the ordinary man hopes to pass away with his dreams, yet another conundrum if like me you never remember them. Perhaps life is like that, best not remembered, not reflected upon for fear of becoming uncomfortable with the thought of lost opportunities.
It's for others to remember you and in this busy life you can hardly expect much more but a passing memory, maybe evoked by an incident but in the general sense you are more like a dream than reality, unless of course you have been a nightmare.