NO CHANGE IN MY PURSE

by Anton Wills-Eve


<a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/a-brand-new-you-effective-tomorrow/”>A Brand New You, Effective Tomorrow</a>

Tomorrow you get to become anyone in the world that you wish. Who are you? You can choose to be anyone alive today, or someone gone long ago.

 

                               NO CHANGE IN MY PURSE  

 

At last, a prompt after my own heart! It might win it too. What a choice. My first inclination was to go for someone from ages past, Cleopatra.

Do I see raised eyebrows around the yuletide fire? I have a reason. Think of all the money it would save me not having to go to Brasil for an extremely expensive sex change operation. Yes, but then I would have to want to become a woman, and I don’t. I have not long mastered the art of being totally male, masculine as well, so I think being queen of the Nile would not attract me that much. And all that fiddling with the asp. God what a way to go. No I’ll stay gendered as I am.

But the question still arises shall I be someone whose life I know in full or someone still with us? A tricky question that. You see if I knew when I was born, how I lived and when I died I would have no more surprises left. But I would have the advantage of knowing all the mysteries of the next life. Yet then I would have to choose to be someone who was deemed almost a saint while on earth. Hmm…. I’m not sure I could quite manage to resist as much temptation as that. But I would like to be certain that Heaven lay in wait for me because I really would miss my friends in paradise.

But on looking around at the people alive today the choice is awful. Age is very important. Would I want to be a young, shy, lovelorn youth tongue tied whenever he met a girl who tickled his fancy? No, I couldn’t go through all that again. It’s fun to look back on but was hell to go through.

Well would I like to be a dashing hero in his early twenties, king of pop, God of sport or Hollywood actor who had every female in the world panting after him? Well good looking enough, yes, but fighting them off? Oh no. That would put me off passion fruit for life, and true love might pass me by completely.

Well, how about a successful 40 something with loads of cash and able to shower everything he wished on his adored wife and kids? Yes, but it could become boring. And much as I loved her she might be enamoured of ‘another’ and where would that leave me? With enough money to get drunk in my misery every night and die of alcoholic poisoning at an early age.

This is actually getting quite tricky. The problem with aiming to be someone aged 60 plus would mean keeping up a variety of interests to stop me reflecting on nearing my end while entering the last quarter of my allotted span. Well if I could be a head of  state or government that might serve, but look at the crowd we’ve got around today. I cannot think of any government leader with whom I would swap places. But there would be many, I am sure, who might be happy to live as obscurely as I do.

So I think that in the end I might just settle for being me. Okay I am seriously ill – 2016 might never change its last digit – but at least I can look back with pleasure on those I have loved in my life, on the happy as well as the sad moments and, above all, reflect that all in all I haven’t had such a bad time. Okay I’ve been caught up in seven wars, but I have also covered four olympic games, many top sporting events including a lot of major golf and tennis tournaments. Also I have made friends both with heads of state and workers in the poorest quarters of the world helping the ill, the old, the destitute and the bereaved. And most importantly of all I know I have not lived the life of a hero or a saint, but those moments when my courage has failed me, or temptation has been too great for me to resist, have never depressed me so much that I have lost my love of God or the people he created.

No, I’ll brave it out and see how much longer I have to go. But the one regret I will always have is that I will not be around to see how all the grand designs for the future, as set out by today’s ideologists, actually pan out. But maybe a friend or two in Heaven might let me have a peek at earth in 3000 AD if I’m a very good boy!

AWE