The wrinkles stretched across his face like valleys Long and shadowed The years had sculpted and formed his once smooth face like icebergs Slowly carving their memories And you better believe that every one of those wrinkles had a story And was well earned They all showed the evidence of life But that doesn't mean he really lived Those wrinkles Valleys Are fault lines That don't just show what was But what could have been The regrets numbered higher than the years on his body And that was a number he didn't dare count to But it's what he thought about when he looked in the mirror The choices he could have made to make those wrinkles tell a different story Life may be a choose your own adventure book But unlike the books We can't skip ahead And we can't just reread the story when we're done If we don't like the ending And now he was wishing that he would have spent a little more time on some of those chapters Not just to alter the details But to really savor the feelings Now he was just left with their residual effects Lingering Partial flashbacks To times when he wasn't afraid to count those years And the valleys had just started forming There was a phantom pain on his skin where she used to touch him He hadn't felt her fire on him in years But every once in a while he felt a burning sensation on his arm Goosebumps forming for no reason Just sparks compared to what he had used to feel Like there were fragments of her left in him Trying to remind his wrinkled skin of the way she had used to make him feel How could he ever forget She was the only part of his life that he could look back on and have a hard time finding even a single Regret Even if the moments hadn't played out quite as perfectly as they had in his head Their imperfection was made perfect by her being there A part of them Just as much as she was a part of him He had only gotten to see half of the sculpting that the icebergs planned to do to her And sometimes he'd see her in the mirror Out of the corner of his eye He'd try to complete what the icebergs had left unfinished Molding her like clay with his eyes Catching her up on where he'd been Like he had the same wisdom as the gods in how kind the years would have been He had no doubt that they would have been far kinder to her than they had been to him She had always been the better looking one Then Just as fast as the years had gone She was gone from the mirror too And it was just Him Her absence left a pain on his heart even stronger than her Ghost touches That he felt on his arm The promise of forever that they had made Wasn't one that her body had allowed her to keep But he upheld his end of it His body wrinkling While hers decomposed in the grave And soon He hoped He'd join her Forever He thought Didn't just cover this life But all the lives to follow He'd find her And he hoped in one of the lives Or the afterlife When he looked in the mirror He wouldn't be seeing just his wrinkled face Those icebergs sculpt too masterful of a picture For it to never be seen to the finish