The idea here was to point my finger at the usual sequence of life. Death, Learning, Birth, Dying. You learn after you are dead, and you are dying the moment you are born. Not a revelation, but I liked the words.

Death – I have died. Not an awakening as much as a pressure releasing and then increasing in a spasmodic way, like the ramblings of thought in moments before sleep. And though the pressure waxes and wanes as with the attention span of a child it is so precisely even that you cannot focus on any one point for it is overwhelming.

I expected something more. Or maybe less, I can’t tell. It’s beginning.

Learning – I will learn. The moment where an epiphany is taxed by scenes of understanding, where scenes of understanding are repressed by the profit of enlightenment, and where the profit of enlightenment becomes lost revenue.

Not so much floating, or swimming as shifting along in a diagonally upward spiral towards what appeared to be something more solid. To say a room would be to look through the eyes of both Dali and Escher the way it shifted and imploded on itself only to be reborn from a bio-morphic cell-shaped blob to form an open cube. This is my education.

Birth – I am reborn. A moment ago is a lost myth; yesterday truly did not exist. Like stumbling hard into a room filled with my peers… who’s eyes are burning blind with envy. There is no going back.

The stirring of atoms that await me, melt, merge, split and squirm. Bursting forth before my eyes, they form the nuclei of the cells of the egg of the sperm of the man of the woman of the synaptic impulses of the idea of love. I feel a tug at something inside. I am not flesh and yet, something within my essence is being pulled away, being taken and yet given. I don’t feel the loss of understanding over the rush of incomplete awareness. The inferiority of the gain would easily have ravaged my heart and mind if I were allowed to have felt it.

Dying – I will fall. The dull never-ending ache of being re-engineered by the dying or the short, sharp, shock of self-conception.

Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, families, friends, bullies, lovers, doctors, dentists, laborers, governors, bosses, co-workers, teammates, foreigners… They push and they pull and they poke and they guide and they fight and they love and they hold and they ride and they grip and they graze and they slash and they tear and they eat and they wish and they chance and they wear… I accept and discard. I learn and I lose. I feel and grow hard. I hate and I choose. I say and I shake. I quietly pass. I look and I ache. I shift and amass.