𝗦ometimes, in the small hours of the morning, as I fade out of consciousness into the dark—death’s daily rehearsal—the ungraspable, goliath weight of my existence and its mortal nature bears down on me like a peine forte et dure; a vise with infinite torque. Reflections on my time and place, in relation to other such meditations, become a recursive, microscopic lens into the accelerating nature of amassed, lived experience as I perceive it. I acknowledge—and wonder—how similar it must be to those around me; robbed of or gifted with varied kinds and measures of self-awareness.
Though I don’t place much stock in the notion of specific supernatural powers or the nature of antecedents to, or successive lives beyond, this one, I often find myself wondering if this existence is what many religions might conceive of as a form of Hell. It’s a place where I know what must be done to survive and, further, to progress—yet I remain painfully aware of what’s expected and how tragically fated it all is, trapped in a lifetime of empirically pointless, mindless, numbing, withering, Sisyphean repetition. Perhaps the only escape lies in letting go—in certain ways and degrees—a realization that feels, ultimately and rationally, like the sole path out of a self- or externally-imposed state of, for lack of a better word, damnation.
As the wet, lipid sphere inside my skull storms louder and wider with each successive attempt to surrender to rest, the entirety of my fragmented, curated memory is sifted through—a fine-toothed magnetic comb raking across an endless shore, laden with sundry visceral minerals, to be smelted or refined by time’s unruly friction. Entire experiences, places, people—and so many other things—have already been lost or faded to its passage. Years that once felt like epochs now collapse into months or weeks the longer I am here.
So much of existence now is seemingly eternal waiting, confined by material necessity and the inescapable defects and expectations imposed upon everyone and everything around me by mass madness and ill reasoning. How much of our irrevocably limited time is lost to the senseless violence of forces like terror and misplaced attachment? How many dreams, how much potential, have been ground asunder by these damned, unforgivable, and cosmically petty fears and burdens?
I’m nearly halfway to oblivion, as far as anyone who is or has ever been could sincerely tell. I hesitate to diminish my thoughts and experiences in these moments to something as simple as a so-called, cliché “mid-life” crisis, because I cannot, with confidence, assert that I’ve had what might genuinely be recognized as a life at all—amidst an existence thus far comprised overwhelmingly of scraping and surviving just to simply be. As time slowly erases everything further, I already feel existentially exhausted in ways I imagine the full scale of a lifetime must make one feel. I feel like a consciousness with meager agency, merely existing in the shadow of the long-expired idea of a life or person, stretched beyond my own expiration date. I feel dead where I stand—helpless to affect any real or lasting change upon the face of these conditions in these direct moments, let alone into an ambiguous, uncertain future.
I’ve experienced many things, gained and lost so many connections and memories—yet all of it has unfolded against an unyielding churn, ceaselessly pulling everything under. So many of the people I’ve loved, or who have loved me, have died—literally or metaphorically. I’ve wittingly, and more often unwittingly, played some variation of the hero or the villain in the lives or existences of others. And all around me, I see others experiencing things similarly, whether they ever pause to consider it to any extent—or at all.
What’s to come of what time I have left? We—have left?
How can we know, with such great certainty, that this—all of this—is so preciously finite, and still numbly carry on the way we do? In all our cases, at this point in time, in these conditions, such questions feel piercingly immediate and inescapable.
I find myself, my love, and so many others—familiar and foreign—trapped unshakably within time as it does what it does. The siren song of security and common sensibility rings out not as a clarion call, but as a dirge for all the needless, godforsaken yearning.