apples and water

into the late hours
of night
you watch a film,
a documentary, on a woman
who
slowly dies
in an abandoned house in
new Hampshire,
surviving as best she can
on water and apples.
she keeps a journal
for the few months she's
alive.
no lights, no heat, no
contact
with the outside world.
it's moving as she scratches
out into her notebook,
with less and less
strength, her
dying days. the film
is interspersed with
childhood friends, a sister,
a daughter, doctors,
each never knowing what to
do with this woman who
went off the rails
and needed help, but never
got it to the degree
she needed.
sometimes you feel that we've
all been at there
at some point in our lives,
lost and lonely,
and now, at the end,
hardly sixty, she's alone,
a prisoner of her own
mind, in this farmhouse
off the road,
eating apples, sipping
water, biding time.