As the minutes shed by and the hours unfurl I am becoming ever so slightly viscous, tacky, a little sticky so to speak. Things tend to adhere to me, to not flow, almost as if my skin is blending into my surroundings, like I am melting into the background of reality. I pick things up, they fall, I open the cupboard items coming flying out at me, I attempt to close doors but they remain stubbornly wedged into the aether. This is happening more frequently and more apparent day by day.
Is this what it means to become old, is this what happens? Do we slowly disintegrate and smelt into the dark matter of the living universe? Thawing into strands of energy which slowly dissolve into the cocoon of death? All our memories stuck, cemented in the past with no way of us taking them with us; as our minds race through the maze of time memories light up our way, but their shine lasts only to the next turn, the next twist of the tale.
Sometimes I feel as if I have tentacles, as if I have tentacles all round me, growing out of my own aura or body. The older I grow the more prominent they become. The more prominent they become the more I realise that I was not all I seemed to be, existing in paper thin dimensions I grew too big for.
This spark of consciousness within me seems to be incinerating my life, it seems to be burning me alive. Read that slowly: Burning me, alive. And what shall come out of this flaming crescendo, this decades old swan song? I close my eyes and let my tentacles wrap round me.
The answer is ‘I have no clue’, all I know is that I continue,
As I write this I search myself on the meaning of this ‘I’. Once I presumed that I was ‘I’, all that I knew and beheld around me, my friends, my job, my family. But as the thorns of old age strip at my soft declining flesh and my joints fail to meet the demands of my constant desires, this frail and flimsy body is giving up its secrets as it becomes more and more transparent. I am dying, but what is happening to ‘I’, the ‘I’ that created all this in the first place?
‘I’ is changing, transforming. ‘I’ is growing tentacles, can ‘see’ things with my brethren’s eyes, ‘I’ is numinous. ‘I’ is invincible, immortal, forever, ‘I’ is doing you a favour in letting you die; away with rotting, lying, killing flesh, away with the memories of your awful birth, away with the pain of fear, away with loss and hurt. ‘I’ cannot make the anguish stop, but it lets you know it’s okay, it’s alright, it’s natural.
'I' is me in the future, it always was.
