To Muse and Be Amused

She was staring at the marker with glazed eyes and a dead face, still as a statue for what felt like hours. I knew what she was feeling. I knew that all she wanted in that moment was to curl up in her daughter's grave and die, to be with her forever. She wasn't just hurting; she was experiencing the most excruciating pain a human being can suffer, mentally or physically. Someone had squeezed all the air out of her lungs, ripped her heart from her chest, stirred her insides with despair and heartache, and forever changed the essence of her humanity. And that someone was me. I didn't choose to be Death. I was gifted with and cursed by it. Taking lives against my will, being given to me by someone else, sometimes done as an act of mercy, other times as an act of vengeance. I'm used to this. I'm used to all of this. I'm used to seeing the effects of my handiwork in the hearts and faces of loved ones, so much so that I've been hardened by it. Less by the genuin...

I work in a clinic that manages patients who use blood thinners. I see a versatile demographic of people from young to elderly, rich to poor, thin to obese, etc. The one thing I've thought of in earnest recently is people's hands. I know it's a silly thing to think about really, but I find them truly mesmerizing. There's a lifetime of stories in people's hands and when you think about it, that's amazing. There is literally a lifetime of memories right there on two palms and ten fingers. I look at my hands and I see the scars from the number of cuts I've gotten over the years. Cuts suffered from running through thick brush during summers spent at my grandparents. Cuts from handling wood without gloves. A scar from the single stitch I needed in the skin that stretches between my middle and ring fingers when I tried to core an apple with a steak knife... while it was sitting in my hand. I have scars from burns, evidence of a childhood I spent in the kitche...