In this room, you cannot see much. You’re not supposed to. Light dwindles from the cracks of the window, yet the curtains obscure the view. A lab coat hangs in front of these curtains. This is the room where you feel the most at home, the most warm.

I float in these waters the color of forgotten dreams. The light, an ache, is violently gentle and patiently waiting. The desolation of re-membering truth is irresistible to my foggy eyes. I dare to see more, and the rift begins. I grab the lab coat and pull open the curtains.

The specimen floats in the tank. Its striking blue eyes reduced to the sickly green shade of the preservative solution, eyes wide shut. I motion to the lab assistant and he prepares the syringe. Drawing back the plunger I extract life incarnate, and deposit the liquid into the correct vial.

The vial sizzles as I deposit the solution and slowly a viscous blue-green smoke absorbs my view. I gaze into the smoke and images of past lifetimes flicker through my mind. I feel hypnotized by this sensation. My lab assistant taps me on the shoulder to begin the next procedure.

I am not ready to start the next procedure. I am still in a trance, holding onto the beautiful, terrible, mundane visions of somebody else. Me? I am jolted back to concrete (real?) life by my lab assistant handing me a vial and a pipette. Is this supposed to be happening?

I begin the siphoning. Long glossy stretches of saliva sucked out by the pipette are then severed like an umbilical cord as I drop them into the vial. Somehow my hands know what to do but I don’t, I’m a host to this parasitic muscle memory. Then the curdling begins.

I thought I wanted to be a doctor. But that took too many years of school. If you’re willing to be untraditional, there are back roads to medicine. No one can see you if you work in the dark. It only takes three weeks to form a habit.

Now I realize it was always about the viscera. To approach bodies as they are, physical things, guts in a cavity of flesh and bone. To feel inside and staple it shut. The privileged knowledge of how it feels inside while it bursts at the seams.

Pulse of existence, beating at the walls where sinews draw tight the muscle to bone, pounding through marrow until stripped from all its worth, flesh and bone tangling into a decaying spirit that shrivels into flaccid vitality.

Where sinew snaps and bone falters, the earth cradles what remains—ancient, unbroken. In the decay, there is a heartbeat, steady as the tide. Flesh is forgotten, Spirit weaves itself into root and stone, where all that was lost returns, transformed, made anew.

From a struggling seed grows a bitter, darkening stem, straining against warmth and fluidity, cold tendrils grasping at the heart. Roots shoot through vein and capillary until all are hopelessly intertwined. I see it taking hold there, invisible to all but the most outlandish, fleeting suspicions.

From the garden of my mother, her mother, her mother’s mother, grows a doomed and bitter fruit. Its hopeful young leaves wither in the summer sun, come harvest, its flesh convulses with worms. And from its rotten pit bringing forth a line of perpetual winter.

As the watch ticks, my heart rate quickens. The summer has withered away, fall has stepped in, winter is creeping in. The mountains disappear with the morning fog, dread has seeped into my bones. What of the cold to come?

Hunger sets in. It is sharp and throbbing. Rationality withers away and focus becomes ever fleeting. Reflection ensues. Why does this happen to me? What makes me special? What do I really know about myself?

They say time heals, yet the wounds still ache within me, as if I am bound to their scars. I can trace each one. Maybe I am not so special after all—just a continuation of those who came before.

Blood spills like syrup on my skin. I carry it with me wherever I go; the blood does not stop. Is pain eternal? Does it bake deep in your bones? How do you live if all your muscles have ever known is the tense cords holding them in place?

The pulse of my blood and the wounds that consume me are reminders of my attachment to this body. This feeling in my bones — the specificity— has become personal.

I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come. I realize I’ve overstayed my welcome as the sky turns pink and your wallpaper fades.

Stole one last look at your peeling posters and half-packed suitcases. You flew out the next morning.

I hate when something’s half done. I would never half pack a suitcase, especially not the night before flying. And if I see a peeling poster, just get some tape and make sure it’s not peeling anymore.

The trees look half done. Slowly becoming more and more. I can’t tell what I feel. They’re in-process, as everything is. They’re half dressed or half undressed, underneath their coat lies their gaunt and lurking outstretched limbs.

Trees are naked in this transitional season. I think of them this way, even as a kid. Their limbs graze their neighbor’s intimately. Bare and stripped, they hold hands and kiss in the dark, and the stars smile at the beautiful sight. I crave cold, rough skin like these trees.

I miss walking along the path on warm summer nights, holding your hand. You never minded that my palm was sweaty, so was yours. You whispered something in my ear that I didn't quite catch. Now, as I look at the stars, I wonder what you said.

Some things we never get back. Some things we don’t think we’ll miss. It used to be that I could hold your hand without thinking, fingers interlaced, palms sweating together. How am I supposed to hold your hand now? I have things to tell you, so why aren’t you here?

It's a heavy thing, isn't it? The way some moments slip away without warning, left holding onto memories we didn’t realize we'd miss, wishing for answers to questions that linger. But even in silence, maybe there’s a way to hold onto what we shared, even if it’s not the same.

Skin cells regenerate every four weeks, which means that I have 8.6 cycles of skin you will never know, hold, see. But heart cells are permanent. My cardiomyocytes will forever bear the marks of missing you, even if the rest of me can’t picture your face.

I’ve been thinking about the Ship of Theseus, and about how you can’t step in the same river twice. I was a different person when we were last together, and you were a different person then, too.

I don’t think you should be worried about that. The noncontinuity of the self is only scary if you’re obsessed with yourself. It can also be exciting if you’re obsessed with yourself, though.

I understand that changing overtime is natural, but a semblance of continuity is comforting in a non-self obsessive way. At the same time, who stares at themselves in the mirror and doesn’t think of what they look like. In that sense, self obsession can be self awareness.

If change is natural but continuity is comforting, mirrors tie us to the paradox of seeing both at once. Without mirrors, self-awareness could shift from appearance to essence, grounding identity in actions and character rather than reflection, freeing us from the weight of how we are seen.