Woke up before dawn. Standard. The light from the bathroom was… too bright. Or maybe I just looked too hard. New wrinkles. A cluster. Right there, lateral canthus, little fan-like things. CROW’S FEET, they call them. An interesting choice of nomenclature. Avian. Like I'm a bird, marking territory, or maybe just… aging. It was a sudden thing, this wave. Not like seeing a grey hair, which is gradual, insidious even. This was a *discovery*. Like an archaeologist unearths something new and suddenly the whole landscape shifts. A cold feeling. Not just in my stomach, but… deeper. A somatic response. A sudden, visceral reminder of the body’s entropy. (Funny, entropy. Used to think it was just a physics thing. Apparently it applies to skin elasticity too.) For a second, just a flicker, I saw my grandmother. Her hands. Her face. I never thought I’d be… *her*. Not like this. Not in this particular manifestation of the inevitable. And then the thoughts spiral. The gig economy. The lack of… everything. No benefits. No safety net. This body, it’s my instrument. My livelihood. (Well, what’s left of it.) If it goes… if it starts to really *fail*… what then? The market for septuagenarian freelance proofreaders isn’t exactly booming. I’ve always relied on a certain… competence. A certain sharpness. What happens when the machinery starts to seize? The thought of being dependent. Of being… *fragile*. It’s a very particular kind of terror. And it’s staring back at me from the mirror, etched around my eyes. Just… staring.