My Own Fiction

 At my age when there is no husband, no son, no one so near, I can write my own fiction. Those of us near ninety, do write our lives. It's our turn to be Best Sellers with our names far bigger than our titles. Old. We are finally able to be what we actually are even if our bones are ancient and soon to become ash. When we sit and stare, we can fly away into our personal books. If we want to dream in sleep and in daytime, we can. Our dreams are in colour. Some of us live in beautiful unreality and others of us, in our time, spending our last years in the books we read, the music we listen to, beiing with the people who mean the most. They are not the cooers who pat and moan at us, but those close, we might not even know. But they  see us and hear and sense us.  What is closest is mostest now.  The reality world sees us as ugly and wrinkled (whatever that means). to be pitied and cherished truly, but not as now people. We are the used to bes. We are called the wise elders but in truth, in private we are called "old lady" or the "old man". Or worse. We know it, but we are kind and smile and nod rather than rant. If we rant, they tie us into what is called a "home" or the back room because "it's all we need at this age". None of the unkind kindnesses hurt us because we live in our own fiction. No one is able to reach into our mind rooms where we are princesses, princes, pirates or heroes who can fly and conquer anything and are richly loved and adored. There we are free in the lands behind our eyes. There in our fiction, we never were the school kid the other ones shunned or left out of their games. We won the prizes at the fair or got the top marks in high school and were elected president of the Student Council.  Where we worked, we were the bosses, the admired invators, the ones who went far. Right now, we see smiling, all the ones we loved who went away and didn't come back. Here they are  now in our fiction,  and we smile. We are living non-fiction of our fiction. We are the old.