Daily Routine, by Ruyi Wen

Listen to Ruyi read her piece below.

Wake up, yawn, greet the sun. The first of six tiny meals, each of which fits on a teacup saucer. Accompanied by the teacup, brimming with your favorite form of catechins, jasmine loose leaf. Just enough to dull the hunger. Scientists say rats who consume forty percent fewer calories live forty percent longer. I nibble at overnight oats the ashen color of a corpse, silently chanting with each bite that nothing tastes as good as life feels.

Physical activity in the form of some punny portmanteau like aquarobics or jazzercise. Nice and easy on my joints, some of which are on their third or fourth titanium reincarnations. I run in slow motion, arms flapping in tempo with the thumping of my twice-transplanted heart. Do you remember, is it thirty minutes a day, or sixty, that we’re supposed to do this for optimal health? My head turns left as the question rises in my throat, but then I see the empty place and swallow the words. The trainer yells in my other ear, don’t forget to hydrate to dominate.

Post-workout snack of seaweed, radish, oily fish. Gotta be in it to win it, chirps the dietician, at the sight of my scowl and extruding tongue. I suck in my breath and gulp a grilled sardine whole, pretending it’s a buttery biscuit smothered in thick gravy, even though I can no longer remember the smell of a saturated fat.

What’s nine plus twelve, three minus eleven, the square of seven? An hour of mental math a day keeps the dementia away, chides the drill coach when my responses come too slowly. Then it’s time for seeds, berries, nuts in an incoherent mishmash of micronutrients, washed down with a rainbow of vitamin pills, followed by a two-kilometer walk to keep the limbs limber.

Thumb through the selection of mental aerobics in the game room: Life, Risk, Go. But all of them require a friend or three. I do a book of crossword puzzles instead, wishing you were here to tell me a ten-letter word for the feeling of time flowing like molasses.

For dinner, indecision. Some say alcohol only does harm. Others say a glass of red wine is good for the ticker. I split the difference and pour out a half-measure of Bordeaux. Toss it back in one gulp. You always preferred the taste of Riesling. What taste, I asked, white wine has no polyphenols. I reached over and held your hand. Look, Laura, we may not have had children, or big careers, or the kind of adventures that get made into based-on-a-true-story movies. But this—I tapped my wineglass, the color of oxblood—is the fountain of youth that Ponce de Leon never found. Think of the fame and fortune that await the first people to live forever. Our legacy can be undying. What do you say? Teamwork makes the dream work?

You smiled and squeezed my hand.

In retrospect, maybe that was your quiet way of saying you were throwing in the towel, that if I wanted to chase the rest of eternity, I’d have to do it alone. As with so many other hints you dropped throughout the years, I didn’t pick this one up, not until I reached over in bed one morning and felt the cold, stiff shock of betrayal.

But, as the psychologist keeps reminding me, it’s not healthy to dwell on that. Negative thoughts have a negative impact on longevity. Keep my eyes on the prize! Anyways, it’s getting late. Time to shower, shave, meditate. Envision immortality as a golden orb so close, my fingertips graze the surface. Early to bed and early to rise, as they say. I’ll live another day.

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