IDENTITY 3

Too old and too exhausted to be ashamed of my cultural snobbery and aspirations. Also of my desire to be a tough male, etc

Fragile life is. Any moment any of us could disappear. Worse than dying, as dying implies a being going through a stage in being. But they disappear our loved ones when they die. Like in my dream of 20 years ago, when a friend was disappearing on his bed and I had to run back to rescue him. Or like when I was out of my body and trying to leave my bedroom to inflict revenge on a loved one out of jealousy, as I stood on the threshold of the doorway, I started to disappear like smoke into an invisible abyss beneath me, and had to return to my body or disappear. How can Toby, Dad, Mom, George, Russell, and so many others not be here? Not be?

What form do we have after we die, if we have any being at all? All of the forms of this reality seem arbitrary to me, temporary, not necessary. What is necessary? Love of others? Love of duty, beauty, children? A good laugh? We crawl about the Earth, mostly surviving in spite of all the possibilities of death, crawling through little ‘tunnels of safety’ we have carved for ourselves, but even more, imagining that these tunnels are much stronger than they are. Imagining that these forms we have are permanent. Are our identity. But perhaps our real identity has not his form, or that form. Not this, not that. And so if we love, can we love beyond the form those we love inhabit? Does real love not alter when it alteration finds?