Your subscription has expired.

Aren’t those words kind of terrifying to hear or read? Like a middle-of-the-night call from your guardian angel, the one you always dreaded hearing? Sometimes, they’re so audible in the darkness, you sit straight up and shout, “I HAVE EIGHT MORE ISSUES!”

But She was standing at the foot of my bed, shimmering faintly in the light of a passing car headlights that float across the wall, sweetly and softly whispering as she held her hand towards me, “Jerry? Your subscription has expired.”

“I had 800 issues.”

“That was an old deal.”

“What, didn’t I get a notice?

“You’re a nonagenarian, what do you want? A harp band? Be sweet. You’ll like it here on the other side. We have permanent daylight saving and lots of decaf.”

With those comforting words coming from an angel who looked familiar, you know that this time, a renewal is no longer being offered. You’ve been given as many issues to skim through as the great bookkeeper has under your name in her file. Sometimes, I think She uses the pencil with an eraser to give more hours to lovers.

No. Be serious. This time it’s more sales pitch than spiritual. I wake up from that dream in a sweat, haunted by most of my magazine covers floating before me. But am I actually terrified? No!

It’s just a notice on a fake cover of the magazines you’ve treasured for years. Because I have, for many years, been a magazine reader addicted to the glossy covers of Time, Life, Newsweek, The New Yorker, New York, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, the political The Week, and various “How to Get Rich” mags that crowd my rusty mailbox down at the road.

It was crowded as well this year with legal documents, insurance and medical documents, auto ads and others from real estate folks and the flood of sweet regrets.

Now with all of those long gone, and with the fortunes of many gone astray, I’ve chosen to depart that crusty world I lived in for most of my adult life. I will be leaving it all to the multitudes, and the thunder of cheering, sign-waving crowds.

In fact, with my sweet beloved’s sad departure from at least this grey visible world, the piles of fashion, cooking and gift catalogues bear the same warning.

This has left me, at winter’s start, with the icy wind blowing through my rusted mailbox in the dark of night, howling up the hill to rattle my windows and shake my sheets with the voices of a 600-soprano choir: Your subscription has expired.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.