i am afraid

Photo by Austin Neill on Unsplash

i am afraid that i will be talked about as if i don’t—or didn’t—matter.

the future plagues me as if it were a walking nightmare, following me down dark alleys that i seek refuge in. dark alleys that remind me of the past.

there are few things as valuable as our ability to reconnect to the past, like opening a sparking portal that burns us with its reality but without the pulsing shimmer of pain that comes with the processing of such. we can see ourselves looking through at we once thought we did not understand. and maybe we still don’t.

sometimes it feels like i have boarded a ship and it has carried me out to sea, to a point where i can barely make out where it was that i came from, where i boarded and where i once thought was the entirety of the earth. and below me i can see the depths of what it means to be dead and deities from every faith beg me to dive down to dine with them, and i do not know—should i fall into them or try to return to where i once was?

i have an idea of where i was, just enough can i make out of where i was, in fact, that i can fill in the blanks with what perhaps i wish were true.

and then the law of entropy had its way with my own ways.

reality rarely coincides with remembrance…only the purity of recognition can trigger the rapture of false memories.

can it be that we can do more than merely embrace the past lives we have lived—rather, can we inhabit them like a coat that was forgotten in the back of the closet?

i feel the acidic amniotic fluid of the future, is this why?—why i want to flee the now for the then?—the future’s nascent fluid burns me as each new age is born. and i feel offended that i must forsake what has come before for what will come.

to give up my old bed for the beds of those stillborn and mannequin-like, waxy or otherwise begging for everyone to be gentle with them: this is what is being asked of me.

when each birth is a disguised spear thrown through the heart of what it means to be human, and when all i try to do is soften the blow, i only end up shoving it deeper into myself. and i feel orphaned by what has happened to us all.

i am afraid for the future. i am afraid and it’s everything i know, everything i fear—coming true because of what?—all of us or all of them?, whoever they are?—or are we all, all, all, fundamentally broken?

am i alone?