When we meet, down the road somewhere

"happy to see you" i will say, you older but not wiser, your gray hair and worry lines more prominent now. my eyes study you, searching for all of the differences between then and now that have settled themselves into the pores of your face and body, and i wonder why things get older with age, why time whittles us away to the bone, when we have outgrown our purpose. then you say i am the single exception, preserved in time as though locked air-tight in a jar and sitting on someone's shelf. and i smile but i know that that is not the truth but a half truth; because i am younger than you but i chip away, too. and it's really too bad isn't it this constant killing of our flesh so that we are almost out of time before we realize the thing we came to do, the thing we simply must accomplish before fate knocks the wind out of us and the souls complain loudly, "why is there no more time? where did it all go? can i have more?" and that would be nice, only the answer is almost always no, their rejected dreams will dwindle in their ever after and that's just the way it is. the lesson, they say, they being the wiser souls, the souls that would know better could they have had extended their allotments, is to capture it fast, your purpose, to seize it and taste it and swallow and then expel your raison d'etre like waste into a toilet, before it's gone, before it gets too lat