momentary

The feeling is fleeting, that passage between the heart and the wide open world, where you remember the bright and beckoning places that once held you close. The times when there were friends and family and some measure of consolation to be found. The years before the getting up was all the labor you could manage. The days when pain wasn’t your only companion. To live within the world, to love and to feel love in in the ebb and the flow, the mystery vivid and all abloom. These days it passes fast, and so I try to cherish it despite my bitterness and despair. Even now as the feeling fades and the illness wells along with these hot and doleful tears, I acknowledge the blessing even as I sink back into this fetid flesh. The world without will do just fine without me.

The heat accumulates over the course of the season, day by day until the nights pass drenched in sweat and the stirring of vestigial feelings, all wishes and oscillating fans. It rustles the leaves and sweeps the wind aside to loom and glide upon every surface and skin. People pass as if a sunny day would sequester all their sorrows, thinking they are free because they are points of infection, vectors that serve to carry the disease with their restlessness and hollow faith in their preciousness. We move on, barely bothering to acknowledge the dead, on the path to become some cautionary tale before calamity and collapse. Smoke em if you got em. Believe me, if I had them, I would. 

This is the year I lost the last of my friends. This is the year the same old same old shifted beneath my feet. This is life, and it’s passage. The consequences of being inconsequential and combative, the long line of told me sos all coming to roost at once. I hope the insurmountable isn’t so, I hope humanity fixes its traditions and finds its feet. There is much to love despite the prevalence of dull villains and unrepentant shitheels. The preponderance of selfishness that I find my useless self upon the same side of history with is unsustainable, and I am glad to be driven to extinction along with the rest of the trash. The beautiful hearts still move me, even if they no longer can sustain me. I hope my passing lands like a bouquet of blessings, an explosion of warmth and butterflies after a long cold winter. The simple symmetry of a long overdue return to dust.