Half-life

Half-life - a reading (on YouTube)

Unstable degradation. Statistical decay.

As I reflect on my life, I find time has become mutable, radioactive and mutagenic. I am a blackout victim haunted by the ghosts of my past. I run across lines in my notebook and recognize the handwriting but don't remember jotting them down. Some still send icicles crashing down my spine.

I sort through the scraps of paper trying to piece the notes of my past back together. I only decipher a list of casualties whose bodies lie forgotten at the communications outpost from when the trenches were overrun.

Too many companions have gone missing. How many were silenced by friendly fire? I don't remember. My memory is now a trauma ward full of head wounds suffering one too many concussions. So many events have become ephemeral and translucent that they almost disappear.

Desperate for direction, I seek guidance before sleep. I wake on the verge of screaming from the dream that follows. Alone in the dark, I wonder what path my life should take from its small, subconscious symbols. If they are the answer, it would have been better not to ask. Or, perhaps, the answer was not the dream but the hour of writing that followed when sleep would not return.

Life alternates between moments of stolen moonlight and chasing the sun from room to room as it migrates through the seasons. I map the maze from memory, caging still-lifes as my legend. I capture story fragments on the journey as others collect vacation snapshots, painting scenes like signposts in case I stray this way again. Such lost and wandering moments have become my life now. And in that living, I am content.

This year, I reach half the age of my oldest known relative when she died. Half this life lies beneath the reflective pool which was once a boiling cauldron. The pathways of the second half are now limited by my choices in the first.


© 2009 Edward P. Morgan III