She’d been a punk and straight edge. Now she was broken down. And old. But she didn’t know it, just as no person knows he or she is old. To others, because everyone stays a certain age inside. For most people it is mid-thirties. And only on bad days do they see the devastation left behind by the slowly deteriorating cells. But then people forget these horrible moments in the mirror, and they are lost within again, in their mid-thirties. But now the old woman was too broken down for such self-deception. Legs full of fluid, eyes cloudy, ears deaf. And always the coughs and bone pain, that’s the worst, when all your bones hurt, when you want to rip them all out. The old woman was fifty or eighty and just didn’t care anymore. She no longer hoped for a miracle, she was bored and sick of everything, and she just wanted to go to sleep, because she saw her future as nothing more than a hospital stay where various machines would barely keep her alive so they could make their contribution to medical advancement. Medically assisted suicide was illegal. It was more agreeable to the decision makers to let death result from illness and age in all its excruciating lack of speed. Hewing to a mildly sadistic proclivity. From the moment she awoke she clenched her jaw in rage, as there were no teeth left. A couple of idiots sat around parliament and decided how long she had to lie around a homeless shelter. They signed papers with Montblanc pens and then went off to brunch. And she lay here unable to pursue medically assisted suicide. Like in civilized countries, where friendly social democrats turned up with a bit of poison, observed with blubbering sympathy, and put out your light. The humiliation of being dependent dragged out to the last meter. At which point some fucking assholes forced an old woman to go up to a rooftop in her condition and jump and possibly hurt a few other people upon impact. The old woman had imagined all the possible ways to check out. None was tolerable. They all involved shitting your pants, a lot of effort, pain, or frightening other people. All because a few well-off fuckers had decided to make it so. The old woman would stop eating and drinking, which, after four days, ended in admission to a clinic where she would be force-fed so that she could be returned to her six-bed room at the homeless shelter where she would once again refuse to eat. And her rage would become hate and disgust related to her own humiliation. She left this earth with these feelings, and if you wanted to give any credence to religious nuts, these feelings would accompany her for all eternity in hell, where only people like her ended up.

The atmosphere at the shelter is uncomfortable.

There’s no other word

PETER