Memento Mori

It is often the case on the weekends, at least in the winter, that I will not see the Sun. I’ll wake up late, not eat lunch, and forget I can go outside until it is too late. Exiting my dorm at 5 pm I am often struck by this fact. Because natural light struggles to make its way past the concrete pit and the wrought iron fence outside my basement window, many winter Saturdays will pass without sunlight.

Wait no this wasn’t supposed to be the depressing part.

I bring this up because, as is often the case, last Saturday I exited my dorm at 5 pm, looked towards the sun, and realized it had already set. But, unlike most nights when the sky is an inky black, what I stared up at was this beautiful shade of dark blue. There was just enough light left from the sunset, and because of the discontinuous cloud cover, the sky was this ever-shifting watercolor painting. It was like standing in an art gallery, gazing up at a work of cosmic scale.

It only lasted for a minute, but I understand why people will wake up early for sunrises or stay out late for sunsets. The hand of chaotic and unpredictable systems painted the sky with patterns and colors no human eye will ever see again.

There is a hardship that comes with being alive for many, but this is an intense and immense privilege I was granted. I feel lucky that I got to witness such a night sky. Had I taken but an extra five minutes to leave my dorm I would have never even known the beauty I would miss.

The Snake

Seeing that night sky changed me. I think for the better. But still, it did change me.

Part of being alive is changing, and I think in a very real sense this means we are not the same person year over year. No one can truly say that when I was sixteen I was as ‘Max’ as I am now. That doesn’t even make sense, we are just different people. Different hopes. Different days and different nights. Different dreams.

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to go.

But what if I have to? That’s just what it means to live.

I think I might be in love. Well, truth be told, I’m not sure I know what that word means, if I ever did. But I think I might be in love.

I would not be in this place if I had not changed. Day over day I shifted, and I shifted into the sort of person who is, for the first time in a long time, awkward and tripping over his own words as he talks on the phone with a girl.

Change brings loss. The loss of a moment, especially moments of deep beauty. But change also brings new and equally beautiful things. I’ll never see that watercolor sketched sky again, as long as I live. But I’ll see new sunsets. Pinks that spread across the horizon. Brilliant bright blues and endlessly black midnights.

Change takes things. Things I deeply love, and wish I could see again, if only one more time. But change brings things I’ll treasure just as much. I’ve never really know how to feel about this. But in this current moment I’m happy with what change has brought me.

That Eats Itself

A few months ago I encountered a beautiful idea in a comic.

What if when we died, instead of decomposing, an entirely new person, an entirely new body, sprouted from what was?

The mutants of Krakoa are immortal. The Immortal X-Men. Mental backups from across their life, and genetic code, all stored across multiple redundancies, allow for endless resurrection. They could even return as they were in the past, without the memories of the days they have now lived. But should they die on Otherworld, an Avalon inspired dimension at the confluence of the multiverse, they will truly die. Their mind and its archived copies become corrupted, at least in the sense that it is no longer what was, and upon resurrection their physical form forcibly changes to serve the new person who stands in the place of the changeless old.

One of the mutants dies in Otherworld. What they are is forever gone, erased from the Krakoan archives. They muse, as they stare out and up at the night sky, that they would one day like to die again in Otherworld. Change brought them here, and one day they want someone new to use their eyes to see what they see.

When I die let them use my atoms to make something new. These won’t be the last eyes to gaze up at the sky in wonder. I won’t let that happen.

I don’t want them to bury me under rock and dirt. I don’t want my body to turn to entropic sludge as the decades pass. I want to see beautiful things, and in lieu of that I want someone else to. I don’t want to be the last person who falls in love.

I’ve always had difficulty expressing myself. Maybe that’s why I was single for so long. But I remember discovering I could write, deep into the fall of the pandemic. I felt something churning in my heart, and I crafted that feeling into a story. A small thing I could show people so perhaps they could relate to me, if only a tiny bit more. But I’ll never get to relive that discovery. I’ll never again get to live those nights where I’d let music wash over me and turned sound into digital ink.

Maybe someone else will, one day.

They’ll see the world in a way I’ll never be able to again. I can only fall in love with a person once. There are beautiful things that will dull as I dull. But one day someone full of life will walk the world, perhaps in my stead or perhaps unrelated. They will see new and intensely wonderful things.

In the face of death let life triumph, no matter whose it is. 

Ouroboros

I wrote the end of this essay before the beginning. Like a snake eating its own tale I am inevitably traveling towards my own end. I want to run, I wish I could hide. But the immutable truth I’ve already written won’t let me. No matter what we are traveling towards the ending a dead man wrote. Trapped in the final paragraphs is the person I consumed to propel myself here.

Once More

It’s already started. I can’t stop it now. This is just the reset.

I’ve been in this place before.

Am I destined to repeat this over and over again until my life is gone from me? Must my new year’s tradition be a preoccupation with my own death? My own impersistent identity? 

I’ll be in this place again.

Memento Mori

I don’t want to lose the things I love. I don’t want to lose myself.

But I already have. I’ve died a dozen deaths this year alone. I can see the lingering images of people who woke up a week ago, but I can’t feel what they felt. I can’t see the world through the eyes they had.

They are alien to me, just a grim reminder of what is to come. Death.

Six months ago, before anyone else had moved into their dorm room, I sat alone and wrote. I wrote of great shame I kept hidden, and a great hate that threatened to consume me. I tried to express why and how and what it felt like to so deeply despise myself I cried. 

And now that feeling is forever gone. Everyone I know knows of the reasons I thought explained why my blood boiled when I thought about my own self worth. I just can’t see why the things I thought made me worthless could ever have been reasons to hate myself.

I don’t mourn this loss, but I mourn what it is emblematic of. The very nature of that person is gone. I will never see the world that way again. We are two different creatures, spread across time, a gulf of six months separating us forever. Someone died when I published that essay. I died.

The Snake

When I close my eyes I can see the moments of my past fate has randomly chosen to imprint on my neural pathways. Every time I bring them forward my brain permanently warps them, slowly robbing me of my ability to properly recall the traces of my life I can still call mine.

One day they will morph beyond recognition, and I’ll be none the wiser. I’ll think this is how these moments always were.

They will be lost to me forever.

I remember when I was angry all the time, though this epoch of my past is rapidly becoming foreign to me. I no longer understand the way my mind worked then, I just have the memory of my memory.

When I close my eyes I can see a hike I went on with my family. The long wooden pathway built above a river. From the parking lot it slopes down deeper and deeper into the forest.

I can see the hill we walked up. The view above the nearby lake. The empty beach, far below us.

I can feel the trees cascading afternoon shadows down upon me, and the patterns moss tile the forest floor with. 

As I try to draw more out my mind fails me. Senses become twisted and different trips meld in on each other. I can’t tell where one hike begins or where another ends, or which years separate them.

But I remember this hike, and my headphones as I tried to tune out the world.

I want to scream at myself, use my desperation and willpower to force myself back in time. Don’t you realize your parents will one day die? You’ll wake up and never see your dog again. Your grandparents won’t be here forever.

You idiot. What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you appreciate this moment in time you had? So blinded by your anger and youth you couldn’t see what was in front of you. 

I want to scream at myself. But no one could hear me if I did. Just void and shifting memories, a fake world presenting itself as if it was my life.

One day there will be nothing left of me. Just regret and sadness and the lingering fragments of moments I wasted. Times will change and fade, and I’ll be left alone and powerless. Peering back through time, wishing I could hug my mom or be a better brother.

That Eats Itself

This was supposed to be a celebration of death. When I’m gone let something new see the universe through the eyes I once had.

But I still can’t let go. I don’t know how. Every single second I’m dying. Every single second another moment I could be totally engrossed in the existence of my friends and family slips by. Each new second brings an instance I will one day be shackled by, a failure to capitalize the present which I will mourn.

I can’t stop the passage of time. We may one day halt aging, but I’ll never get back my middle school years.

Maybe I won’t have to watch my family die, but my personality, my very nature, it will still twist and turn until it’s unrecognizable.

Will I wake up tomorrow and hate my family? Will I burn decade old friendships? Drift so far every hobby, every passion, every thing, that made me Max becomes repulsive?

How could I accept a world where I can’t hug my Mom? How could I accept a world where I don’t remember the face of my Father? How could I live if conversation with my brothers was unbearable?

I’m going to die.

I don’t want to die.

Please…

Ouroboros

I wrote this essay across different days and different weeks. Different people are trapped in different paragraphs. It starts with someone awed by the idea that all the joy, all the wonder, he has felt or seen may one day be the privileged experience of some new person. I got my turn to see the value life brings, one day someone just as amazing will forge their own path again. Even if they’re not me.

Then someone new opened this Google doc late one Thursday night. Consumed by dread they tried to capture the fear they felt. Fear they wouldn’t see their loved ones tomorrow. Under the crushing weight of regret, and anger at their powerlessness to fix a life full of squandered moments, they tried to capture what it felt like to cry as they considered a world without their parents.

And then time marched forward.

Someone new sat under a blanket and tissues, tired and sad. Slumped against a wall wishing they knew how to end this essay. How to breathe hope back into their life.

Tomorrow a new man will read these fragile words. He will fix the grammar and fish hope from the void. Find some way to end this, and then format it for the web.

And I’ll still be here. Slumped against my wall, wishing I could fix my past and hold onto myself. Desperate to see the people who brighten my life and weeping because I’m going to die.

And then I’ll be gone.