:: The Poison Tree ::

Death is a dissolution―a gentle, but categorical, melting of life's crystalised routines. I am blasé about its certainty: we don't die of any condition except having lived. It's an inherent dialectic that's strangely beautiful; life and death in a tensed spectrum of transitory motions and emotions.

And I'm ignorant of its philosophy―I'm neither convinced by religious explanations nor comforted by scientific facts; are we fragments of souls waiting to drift heavenward? Are we molecules of mortality worn by time to break down into soil and fumes? Are we capable of a third dimension existence? Are we lambs of God or children of the universe? Did the creator create us? Or did our creativity create the creator?

I couldn't help but think think think: my thoughts were raging like an insidious tide. CM was broken down by anguish: she was dead flesh in my arms, her guilt and grief at losing her mother has chased all light out of her eyes.

I had no words of comfort. I stroked her hair like I would my sister; but my tender empathy could not breach her pain.

So I may be blasé about its certainty and ignorant about its philosophy, but death's impact is a scythe; our lives are nothing except mirrored smudges caught on the glint of its blade, and we cannot hope to unlearn its truth.

Truth that our cradle is our grave.
Truth that we are programmed to be extinct.
Truth that our daily struggles are dust fanned by the sands of time.
Truth that though we live with an auric intensity now, our golden youth is but a turn of heaven's eye―a wink of wind that would one day blow our memories to petty cinders.

So why are you sad today? We are nothing but a forests of poisoned trees, gnashed to the ground by our roots, forever stretching upwards to the invincible sky, growing only to wilt, begging to live by instinct, and waiting to die by logic. We are never really here. Hence death is a removal of existence, not a rejection―we are never really here, and we can never fully leave. Life's true beauty is its surreal quality, and death's true value is its tangible reason, which we can neither fault nor blame.

Live. That's the only way to die.