I have walked this earth a thousand times.
Dirt. A loose aggregate of particles, held together by gravity, and moisture.
Rain. Water suspended. Resurging. Cascading in plumes, like sheets of smoke.
Sky. Blue. Stretched like canvas. Abstract. Nowhere. Everywhere.
I exist. Here. Standing. Thinking.
I am dead. I am being born.
I am existing across all time and space, but I do not know it.
At this moment, I am trapped. I am unconscious. I am unaware.
I have walked this earth a thousand times, and cannot even remember.
Because it has not happened. Has yet to happen. May never happen.
Future. A nonexistence on the horizon.
Hope. An ache. A nothing replaced with nothing.
Misery. The wretched face in the mirror.
A child wears my eyes. She drifts through life.
Scared. Alone. Free.
She plays in the forest. Her small, sap-covered hands grasp branch after branch.
She enters intermediate school. Is called freak. Is judged by her skin, her eyes.
She realises she is different for the first time.
Alien. Deviant. Other.
Her eyes fill with self-hatred.
I have watched this moment a thousand times, yet can do nothing.
Disintegration. The act of separation.
Loneliness. A billion strangers condemned to live together.
Existence. A billion billion billion particles, shifting beneath my flesh.
There is no death that can end my being.
I have felt the atoms of my past collide, and spark into biology.
I have felt the atoms of my future shred like fractals, spiralling into a dim, dark nothingness.
I have felt all this, and none of it.
From infinity I came, to infinity I’ll go. Forever cycling in the pantomime of existence.
This pretend construct of space and time.