An old man sits before me, haggard, but he is only twenty-three years old. How could this be? His face is taught and not a wrinkle creases his skin, his muscles protrude from his ancient sweater, and his eyes are an ocean of life. His voice is a deep rumble from the depths of his chest, a volcano erupting after years of dormancy. And he is a prophet, a young man who died years ago.

Sometimes I ask him questions, and sometimes he gives me answers, but communicating with the deceased is difficult for the living at times, as I have come to realize. It is hard to know him, sometimes hard to see him. And at times I do not want to. To those who can hear him, his story is but a whisper, and his message as understandable as a blade of blushing grass. His youth was shorn by a gunshot and a sunburst of vibrant colors. He has been ancient since his thirteenth year of blustery breath.

“I am old and tired,” he tells me.

I try to understand, try to comprehend. But, I can barely hear him speak.

It seems we all age at different moments of time, not at set days that mark certain amount of years surviving. Do we want to cease being at all in order to know? Do we want to be twenty-three years old limping and breaking and cracking like a warm crescent roll torn apart by the fingers of a young human? Is it simply an illusion, this beautiful youth that we seemingly possess? Or is it as real as the ground forcing us upwards as it has been since the day we placed our foot upon it?

What I visualize is a young man with a full head of hair and a heart pumping clean blood. I am a young woman with swift legs and shining teeth, close in age to this prophet but much younger in all other aspects. I have yet to pass away, yet to lose my youth to the earth. I hold fast to my world, let it spin from time to time, but never let it go.

He says he hasn’t been a child since the day he let go, since the day a droplet of death broke like waves around him, washed him away and drowned him in the flood of truth.