Marketplace

I noticed how worn Hazel has gotten and it startled me into a kind of clarity - the sort that comes when you see someone you hold sliding toward a state you can't stop. Hazel is someone I've known a long while, someone whose laugh I measure my days against without quite admitting it. Not illness exactly, not yet, but a thinning. The kind of weariness that tells you the days are not infinite, that time is doing what it always does, which is running through your fingers whether you pay attention or not.