LatinosUSA

The ten-year-old said,
“Gramps, I don’t want to grow a moustache.”
“Why, dear?”
“Because then I’ll grow old.
And if I grow old, I’ll die.
I want to stay exactly as I am.”
He said it in all innocence,
as though time were a door
he could refuse to open.
I laughed then,
softly.
But later, the words returned,
heavy with a wisdom
too large for his small hands.
Now I understand
what trembled beneath his question.
It was not the moustache
he feared,
but the quiet arithmetic
of living:
how every inch we grow
is an inch closer to goodbye.
The child in him
is the child in me
still bargaining with mirrors,
still resisting calendars,
still asking the dark
for one more unmeasured day.
And perhaps
that is what it means to be alive
not the absence of death,
but this tender rebellion against it.