As oblivion slips up around me and ***** me down into unknowningness: All of the things that construct me slide away and fail.  When my breathing slows and stops and consciousness drifts, as though I am going to sleep, to sleep forever dreamless, not even alone because solitude requires self.  Time stretches out for those last few milliseconds: watch as the self is stripped like old paint from a dilapidated wall.  All the names, the places that I have known are disappearing shapes in a fog and are gone.  All the loves I have known, and lost, and loved again flit across my mind for the last time and recede into the dark.  My homes, my family, the games I play and the creaking of my bones fall silent.  Finally I never was a small boy in a sandbox, surprised and frightened by a garter snake.  I never was a young man scaling a high cliff with his friends.  I never drove the coast with a girl I hadn’t yet kissed; I never opened presents on Christmas morning or tasted bitter coffee in a rest area at night.  There is no longer any longing for these memories, these the bones that construct me.  There is no sense of loss, or any recollection that there was something there to lose.  The storefronts of my experiences are rolling down their doors and locking up for the last time: the lights go out one by one and I do not remember if I have ever eaten strawberries, or what they taste like, or if I am brave or foolish.  Colors are gone, no images, no language even to describe this to myself.  Smells are first meaningless and then never were.  There is music still, a thousand thousand songs that have driven me and inspired me and made me laugh and cry and filled me with joy and which I no longer have names for, and this, too, comes to an end.  As the flickering lights are squelched the denizens of the darkness behind personality and our constructed selves are left alone: Fear.  Hunger.  Lust.  Instincts so basic that they require no name, no body to inhabit.  They shrivel and die and are no more.  I no longer know who I am; I am untethered from all I have been and am almost nothing.  All around is blackness, not the blackness of space because location no longer exists and it is the blackness of void, no color nor knowledge of color but there is one unwavering star that remains in the sky and still gives me identity in this last breathless moment.  When that ultimate light fades and finally blinks off--my craving for you--that is when I shall no longer be.