Night Terrors

Another cancer dream. My only recurring nightmare, emergent in bi-annual cycles. Last time, I was a child in the dream, and woke up in tears, and my heart went hollow when I realized that it is not a dream for many real children.

Strangely, they are my only mundane dreams. No phantasmagoria. High detail, intense realism, no fraction of awareness of the waking self.

In this one, I learned I had a year to live. Weeping, I told my mother all of my secrets. Overwhelmed and hopeless, I felt the permanent incompleteness of my now unreachable hopes.

And all day, I was on the verge of crying. I am almost crying now. Because I have a horrible talent for understanding death. Everywhere, I hear the tinkle of shattered glass.

Consciousness is too heavy a burden for something as fragile as an animal body. What indignity to have a mind to refute the godless unsympathy of physics and causality. What grand injustice to cleave self-awareness to a form ruled by entropy, subject to a million upon a million frailties.

We deserve a life unshadowed by death. We deserve so much more than evolution has given us.

Prole

The feeling of adulthood, heavy in the gut: is: 1:1; action/reaction, everything being exactly what it is, resting where placed.

As a child I showed more mercy to injured birds, comforting them in their inevitable deaths, shoebox upon shoebox, than I do to my own life. My own precious life, finite, unguaranteed. My own precious life. My own small and precious life. Frail thing. Untended. Unguarded. Exposed.