This life is not a life.
This life may have never been a life. Like all other lives, this one was brought into the world just like all other births: time contracted, splintered, then fell free. It spins on, squeezing moments into the next before reaching the precipice of death; the meaning of existence divided in two.
It starts like this: Unable to see, unable to hear, unable to piece bits and pieces together because at first our hands can only grasp onto nothing. Compressed is the tale of immeasurable weight, dreams and hopes and beliefs all placed upon soft flesh and weak muscle, the floating plates of a skull.
It starts like this: we refused death and that being is now this being in this time and that child did not die and will not die, and that child opens its eyes to a strange new world and will keep hurtling forwards until it crosses the boundary.
A thousand years ago, ten thousand years ago, one-hundred thousand years ago, life came to be because we did not die before we passed down the torch. We are not pioneers. We are not creatures of change. We do not become which that we are not. We were one thing and we are now another, and another thing is not what we asked to be, so we clawed our way out of the dirt and demanded to be heard.
It starts like this: You were murdered. And then you came back.
