By Charles M. Sumid      Copyright 2025      Written 2016

He can’t turn it off.

Standing behind her at the checkout—
frozen pizzas, diet soda, cat food for one.

The calculation assembles itself.

Seventy-three years, four months.
Maybe five if she starts walking evenings.

Started as a party trick in grad school.
Read shopping carts like mortality tables.

The ones who bought quinoa and kale but also sleeping pills.

The contradiction that predicts—
hope wrestling despair at 3 a.m.

Now he works for the company that insures lives by the thousands.

Days spent in spreadsheets where humans become probabilities.

But here, in the fluorescent ordinary,
the numbers turn back into people.

Young father, cart full of formula, energy drinks, microwave dinners.

His exhaustion is specific: new parent exhaustion,
which reads different from double-shift fatigue,
which tastes different from chemo weariness.

This one: ninety-one years.

His exhaustion is investment.

The gift and the curse—
seeing the terminus in the trajectory.

How choices compound like interest.

The woman buying only soup and wine
doesn’t know her sixty-seven years could be eighty
with one friend, one reason to cook.

He fills his own cart carefully.

Salmon, spinach, dark chocolate.
The algorithm of adding days.

But also: good whiskey, expensive cheese,
the astronomy magazine he’s read since twelve.

Because the other thing he’s learned—
the ones who live longest
aren’t always the ones who live best.

Quality-adjusted life years, they call it at work.

He calls it the poetry between the numbers.