Being No More.

When my last breath was over

The story wasn’t, not yet.

The myths and fabrications

that started with the first assignment

of an identity.

A name. A tag.

Belonging, ownership, larger than biology.

Status, lineage and inheritance.

Burdened pride.

The push for the pursuit to acquire knowledge to explain the world

created to make it less strange and more comprehensible

in part guesswork, in part myth

But wholly subsumed into an assumption of mastery

Especially relative to others’

And over what it sought to comprehend

and only somewhat succeeded.

Relationships defined and codified and reiterated

Through practice, ceremony and social proof.

Position, wealth, power and stature cementing those.

All stories. All made up. All myths.

They still breathe. Because they need a little more closure.

Till then they live on in shared imaginations and belief.

And legal documents.

Dereferenced from my constructed reality one by one.

To then, eventually, become threads of the past

woven in fabrics other stories continue to get added to.

But not right away. I live for a bit more.

Rituals around my lifeless self continue.

The sense of I that lives on in others.

While the I inside of me is gone.

What was that I anyway?

Who was I? As known to whom, and how?

I was unique before, and without that identity —

everything in Nature made me that — just being —

and treated me as such .

Without the other selves that I created, and acquired.

She never judged me for it. Or even knew me like that.

Or treated me well, or not, for it. Not special at all.

Just “being”.

I was from it, and am with it.

My beginning and end were mere events.

There were little stories I was made part of with all of you.

— purpose, glory, joys, sorrows, wins, losses —

but in the one big forever, tiny asides.

On the big canvas, a tiny speck that

changed it forever, yet not at all.