Ours is only one way of seeing. This ever-forward, ever-howling onwardness—uni-directional, all things existing in iteration towards an end—is simply a default: the form in which time first appears to and upon us. Cells grow, skin is ripped from faces; we call it renewal. It is widely agreed upon.

Perhaps death is not out there down the line, at the end of a point. Maybe it lies beneath a thin plain, a deeper soil begetting the shallow. Perhaps it is at the center of an endless spiral, or circle, of which all, I suppose, are endless.

It’s hard to say. Defaults have a way of calcifying, if you’re not careful. Days pass in a snap while time itself seems not to, until one day you look around and a year, a lifetime has passed, and each of your totally absorbing instants has led you to this. All of them: the instant that holds your first kiss, yes; and whenever it was that loss materialized for you and began to pulse; and the one with the sunrise that you first picture when you hear the word “sunrise;” and the last one containing your innocence; and the first one containing hope. The lacquers building you to this you, the self you somehow assume is more or less done, just as they built the one in the photo on your mother’s mantle at which you cringe because you just had no idea at all back then, did you? There you were: doing what you could. How long until you can cringe at the self you were when you began this sentence; how long until you forgive them?

Do you think your last day will be a Tuesday? An even or odd number day? Will the weather be nice? What will be the last thing you worried about? Will you have worried it enough to stop what came?

Very soon now The Day will come once again: the one of many which we’ve plucked from a stream and decided marks the start and end point in the orbit of one body around another. People will say: congratulations, we made it another round. People will say: kiss me.

This is the way we see when nearly asleep, when life happens upon, not through us. Days blur like scenes through a car window to a child about to nod off, believing that their parents will not crash, that illegible fate will not veer into their oncoming lane. This is agency self-stripped, one of the many wounds that we inflict when we excuse ourselves from the drama of our own lives and join the audience.

Something beats beneath the floor; something holds the center of an endless halo. Straight lines are fiats, no more authoritative than any other chosen method of belief.

Let’s put our heads together and believe this: if matter cannot be destroyed, if everything happens in an instant, any instant, then maybe the world and its oxygen exist as nothing more than a record of everything spoken into them. Holding the heat of the lives come and gone. One big dazzling chanting library: available for check-outs and returns, adding shelves as fast as we can write the works for them.

I lived, during the years in which I learned to read, about a five minute scooter ride from the community library. Many times I finished a book in a series with five and one half minutes to spare before the building closed, and the next book up was somewhere there in its shelves. The instants in which wind pulled back my hair and teased water from my eyes; in which the hum of plastic wheels was a cheering crowd, was birdsong, was a language of my own weaving; in which life was a blur still coming into color: these will be the first I check out.

What about you?