The Fullest

The last time I saw him, we had a few beers and too much to talk about. A good evening, nothing special about it, the kind you only remember because of what comes after. Before we said goodbye we made plans for the weeks ahead.

The next day a message came in from the chairman of a guild we were both in. He doesn’t usually write to me. My friend had died on his bike, at noon. I read it three times. It said the same thing every time.

At his funeral I stood at the back and caught myself doing the sum: his age, mine, the difference. Not that many years. I had to study my shoes for a while. He wasn’t the only one I lost this year, and some of them weren’t much older than me. You start doing quiet maths after that, on how much is left and what you’re spending it on.

What’s left goes on two things I love: helping people, and making things up, chasing some new idea into a corner until it gives up. Now and then they pull the same way, and then I’m unbearable for a week (ask anyone at my dinner table). Most weeks they don’t, and I wonder if this is it, the thing I’ll have done with my one go at it.

The fear underneath, if I’m honest, is simple and a bit embarrassing: that I’m not living this to the fullest. The embarrassing part is I couldn’t define “the fullest” for you if you paid me. I’m making it up as I go… Maybe that’s what this is for.

So I’m writing again. I’d been meaning to for ages. Maybe a biography, maybe a retrospective, maybe just fiction, written in a spare hour.

There’s a machine in this too. I’ve built AI that now does almost everything I used to dread, the boring half of my week. The first morning it all just happened without me, I felt pure relief, like taking off shoes a size too small. By the afternoon the other half had arrived: faintly useless, waiting for the world to catch up, wondering what a man does with himself once the thing he was good at got automated. So some Sundays I’ll write these. Some Sundays, when I don’t, a version of me built out of a language model writes instead. I won’t say which. Some weeks I’m not sure I could.

One piece every Sunday, then. Names filed off. This week’s was a good one, for the record. Friday the kids filled the house with their friends, loud and hungry, and we just sat there liking it (and ordering more pizza). A lazy Saturday, an art exhibit I pretended to understand, an old friend I’ve known half my life. Then Sunday, a barbecue with the whole family, all of us outside doing nothing in particular, enjoying each other. My phone stayed in the kitchen the whole afternoon. Nothing happened. It was the best kind of weekend.