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Picture of the Day
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Thursday
September 15,
2022
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| I don't remember anything
before I was born. I don't remember being born.
The first thing I remember is the sun, so bright
and hot. It warmed me through and through. I
glowed with it. // I remember the moons.
Crescent, half, full. I thought each was its own
separate body, a necklace of 28 stones
encircling the Earth. That's how clueless I was.
There was no one to teach me. I was surrounded
by fools. We are all born ignorant, but true
stupidity is not wanting to learn. // Anything I
know, I taught myself. I was curious, observant.
I watched through the night and learned the
moon, internalized its rhythms. And even when it
disappeared I knew it was still there, a black
circle in a black sky, invisible to all but
those looking for it. I looked for it and
tracked its slow arc, a secret hidden in plain
sight. Any rube can fawn over a full moon, but
the new moon is for connoisseurs. We savor its
subtlety. I was alone but happy. // Surrounded
by the dull, inert masses, I prided myself on my
intellect with all the usual arrogance of the
autodidact. I guess I got insufferable because
finally my exasperated neighbor told me we were
nothing more than hairs on the head of something
called a human and, furthermore, while most
hairs were objects of vanity to be shampooed and
groomed, I was unwanted, unsightly, the lowest
of the low. An ear hair. // That took me down a
peg. For all my imagined wisdom, I'd failed to
grasp the obvious. // I was mocked by those
around me. They told me we were nothing but dead
cells, protein filaments sprouting from
follicles in the dermis. Outgrowths with a
function, perhaps, but no purpose. // At first I
denied it, it was such a blow to my self-image.
But I learned to accept it. And dreaded the day
when this human would look in the mirror and
mistake me, in all my individual glory, with all
my self-respect, as something to be disdained
and plucked away. // Fortunately, he seemed to
have an aversion to mirrors, which is how I made
it this long without knowing my true nature. //
I clung to life with the tenacity of a barnacle
on a rock. It got so I could discern the human's
thoughts vibrating through the stiff upper part
of his ear--the helix, to be precise, almost
translucent under bright light. So I knew where
we were going before we got there. // A bell
rang as we entered. One whole wall was a mirror
and I saw myself in proper context for the first
time, watched in horror as the trimmings fell
around me. But those styled hairs gleaming with
tonic were unfazed, chanting, "After you're gone
we'll still be here!" // I didn't want to
believe them but out came the barber's tweezers.
He worked his way up the ear, then pointed at me
and laughed, said I was the longest "wild" he'd
seen. He asked the man if he wanted to keep me
be but my human just laughed. Everyone was
laughing but me. // Suddenly I was in the grip
of something, something unrelenting. Firm.
Inexorable. Undeniable. Then with the slightest
flick of a wrist I was torn loose, yanked from
the only life I'd ever known, cast into the
void. Drifting down to the black and white
squares, I thought of the moon. // They said I'd
been dead my whole life, a mere aggregation of
soulless cells. Mostly keratin. But what did
they know? What looks dead might be alive, and
what seems alive might be dead inside. // It was
only when I was floating free that I saw I had
not been separate from that man. I was him, as
surely as he was an essential component of a
totality he couldn't understand. Now I was
merging with that larger thing, decaying,
particle by particle flaking off, borne into the
sky to fall as rain on a continent an ocean
away.
I don't remember anything after that.
🌑
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