Living

I have never felt more alive than when watching the droplets of my own blood pool into a dark crimson puddle on sun-crackled asphalt. I know that sounds incredibly dark and morbid, but who among us does not hold at least a small token of the sinner's sensibilities? Life and death are so intricately intertwined, it is impossible to clearly demarcate where one begins and the other ends. It is a snake devouring its own tail.

Modern life takes place in a padded room. We are pelted with helmets and knee pads and endless varieties of signs directing us away from the path to self-destruction. What reference then do I have to measure the extent to which I have lived? I am plagued by neither cancer nor mental illness. An outwardly healthy male of twenty-four in reasonbaly decent shape, I am in no position to cherish that which I have never feared of losing.

What is it to me that this reddish ink should leak from my right palm and left wrist and that the cut of my elbow is white with exposed fatty flesh?

I am neither indestructible nor shaped by Fabergé.

There is no life without a little dying.