[SIDE A]

It's coming.

We can never escape it, and most of what we do in life only brings it closer. It draws nearer with every breath we take. We can't stop it.

What are those things called? The places we store those lost to time for remembrance? What are they called?

One of those ones you see on the sides of roads in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere. The ones whose stones are falling over, the names illegible, lost to time's never-ending march.

It's coming, and so we remember.

Ah, yes: cemeteries.

Think of how, once, those people mattered to someone. Somebody cried and threw themselves to the ground over the loss of the name on the stone's keeper. Now, they mean nothing. They are simply a relic of the past, bones in the ground whose only visitors are the animals whose home was invaded by people who wanted nothing more than to, what? To put their loved one's remains in a box in the ground?

But they're long gone. They've had their bones put in the ground, somewhere, in some small, forgotten, run-down, cemetery. And those who loved them have gone and died themselves, had their loved ones carry the burden of moving themselves to put them to the earth. And again, it repeats. Again, and again.

It's coming, and so we wait

But we innovate! To further the distance from it. We invent tonics and elixirs. We build places to mend the tears in our fabric, train minds to help us run from it.

Somehow, it works. We cheat the game and distance ourselves from it, if only for a short time.

It's coming, and so we run.

Time carries on, unremitting and silent. Passing us by and making us wait for the day when the cold cycle to rear its head once more. Until the day it does, and we are forced to watch someone we love turn to dust. We wait and wait until one day it strikes and all that is left are memories.

Doomed, to a fate of waiting for the hand on the clock to come around once again, we are. The only visible mark to be made: a monument, an epithet, and two points strung together on the never-ending line of time.

So wait, we will. For its silent hands to clutch our necks when we least expect. And, catch us, it will, that much is certain. And we'll never see it coming. It will happen at a random time. When we are drinking coffee in the morning, when we are sleeping, when we are walking down the street.

It's com