Yesterday

I was sitting in a hard plastic chair. I was a kindergardener all over again, playing quiet time while waiting for my grandfather to enter the room.

He had been admitted into the hospital yesterday.

Several minutes pass, and he stumbles into the space. He clumsily hooked his IV to the rack above his bed, and collapses onto the mattress, nearly falling off of it in the process.

"Life is fragile," he says, muttering and slurring his words in the process, "this is the lesson we have to learn from this."

His pancreas appeared fine. Just an unnamed, one-time glitch in the complicated symbiosis of the body. Or at least, hopefully it will only happen once.

Because as he said, life truly is like a windowpane, broken with a predictable force or an unexpectedly high-pitched shriek.