The Lasts

Firsts are remarkable. The first time you walk into a new city from a strange airport, the first time you explore a new kind of food. So many firsts still to do, but the lasts are often forgotten about.

Do you remember the last time you used crayons as a child, making those infernal wax sticks skid across a page without snapping in two?

Or that time your mum cut your toast into soldiers for your boiled egg while you fussed about bits of shell getting in the way until you crunched them like broken bird-glass in your mouth?

That favourite toy you had: for me, those Star Wars action figures whose forays onto homemade ziplines into forts made from shoeboxes and bits of foil helped ease my years until suddenly, they were… gone.

The blurry recollection of the last time you had a conversation with someone before they died and the gift of sharing a chat was gone.

The exact moment my last baby tooth exited my mouth?

The final installment on pocket money?

The time my teddy bear stopped speaking to me – and who knows what was said?

The day I sloshed my way through melting snow with my fingertips red and burning from the cold.

The end of a romance with a childhood sweetheart or a best-friend friendship that petered out.

The day I stopped using a microfiche or a landline.

The time a song that moved me dropped from my playlist.

The final time my child wore a nappy or I blew a raspberry on their tummy.

We actively choose the firsts we get to enjoy, but the lasts can sneak past you like a toddler dressed in a ghost sheet, with holes cut for eyes. Stumble, stumble… gone.

On the razor edge of time, reality is sliced suddenly into memory segments – samples on a slide we occasionally put under a defective microscope that can’t capture the entire moment.

Not often deliberate, more likely unacknowledged.

The last time.