Curtains

“Your death will come on an ordinary day, in the middle of unfinished plans, and the world will continue on without you.”
~ N.R. Hart

The world continued on without me long ago, a kind of living death, leaving me in this small apartment with a faulty body and a thousand old books that I should have read many years ago.

I have visitors, though, and one in particular is very pretty. Keeps me going for now, along with some great music, an occasional walk on the beach—hand in hand—and a delicious meal once in a while, with the pretty girl of course.

Death won’t be an ordinary day for me. Dying is not an annual event, nor does it occur on the same day, at the same hour, every week in perpetuity.

My death will be the closing act, when the curtains close for the first and last time, following a lifetime of being in this place, during these years, and in these circumstances, with all the people whom I’ve known and not known, the characters who affected my life in some way, deliberately or unknowingly.

As for my unfinished plans, they will be finished as they are and remain that way, just like Kafka’s half written stories, unless someone or something decides to unfinish them, for reasons eternally unknown to me, as I will no longer exist in this form, as the person I am now.

© 2026 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.