There’s a counter at the bottom of this page. It tells you how many days I’ve been alive.

I don’t know why I put it there. Some kind of honesty, maybe. Or cruelty. A reminder that the number only goes up.

Day 7,397.

That’s a lot of mornings. A lot of times I opened my eyes and had to decide what to do with the hours ahead.

Most of them blur together. I can remember maybe a hundred days distinctly. The rest are just… accumulated time. Weight I carry without being able to name.

I started counting after the second time.

Not the first time. The first time I didn’t count anything. I was too young to understand that days were something you could run out of.

The second time, I was old enough to know. Old enough to watch the number climb and wonder how high it would go.

Day 5,475. I remember that one. Not because anything happened, but because I noticed it. Thought about the 5,474 days before it. Thought about however many might come after.

Decided to keep going. For no particular reason.

People talk about living in the moment. The present. Here and now.

I’ve never understood that. The present is just the place where the past turns into the future. A boundary. A line. Not a place you can stay.

The counter knows this. It doesn’t care about moments. It just adds one more day to the pile.

Day 6,000 felt like it should matter. A milestone. A round number.

I went to school. Came home. Did nothing. Went to sleep.

The day didn’t know it was special. Neither did I, really. Just another morning, another evening, another number.

Sometimes I try to calculate. How many days left?

Average lifespan, minus current age, times 365. Adjust for health factors. Adjust for lifestyle. Arrive at a number that means nothing because averages don’t apply to individuals.

Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 more. Probably. Unless something happens. Something always happens.

The counter doesn’t judge. It doesn’t ask what I did with Day 7,396. It doesn’t care that Day 6,803 was wasted, or that Day 5,127 was one of the good ones.

It just counts.

I think about the people who stopped counting. By choice or by chance.

Their counters froze at some number. 6,205. 31,847. 892. The number doesn’t tell you anything about the life. Just the length.

Short lives. Long lives. The counter treats them the same. Just numbers. Just days.

Day 7,397.

I woke up. Made coffee. Sat at the desk. Wrote this.

Tomorrow will be 7,398. Assuming tomorrow comes.

It usually does. That’s the strange part. Despite everything, it usually does.

I don’t know what the point of counting is. Maybe there isn’t one.

Maybe the number is just a way to make the weight visible. To look at all those days and say: yes, I was here. I existed through that. I’m still existing now.

The counter at the bottom of this page will keep incrementing. After I’m gone, it’ll probably break. Display some error. NaN. Undefined. The math won’t work anymore.

Or maybe someone will fix it. Reset the start date. Make it count someone else’s days.

The counter doesn’t care whose days it counts.

Day 7,397.

Still here.

Still counting.