I am a fat idiot

I have become fat and dull, pleasure loving, lazy. I wallow about the house in sun and rain, peek timidly outside sometimes, worried. The cows wake me in the morning, and the carpenter bees make a racket all afternoon. When sometimes I amble by the mirror I am disgusted. More often I steel myself against an accidental peek, and march crablike across my room looking askance so the mirror will not show me.

My mind is no better. One hopes for the redemption of a strong mind in a weak body, the compensation that somehow brings the whole up to the general mark, but this is nowhere to be found. After the sort of denial that only I can manage, I have acceded to the force of evidence. My mind retains nothing. Where once it could be viewed as amusing to leave one’s shoes planted unfindable on an upstairs shelf, or one’s keys in a kitchen cabinet and therefore lost, and thereby delaying arrival at work, this kind of event has ceased to entertain. Where once the forgetting of names and conversations could be excused with a chuckle, it is now the siren of emergency response that follows it.