Lost

"Life is short!" They say it joyfully, a cheer for experimentation. Or they say it wistfully, with the breathy confidence of conventional wisdom.

They never say it with the terror of gaping paradox.

They never say, "Life is short! But I have waited so long for this day to be over." They never say, "How can life be so short when I have spent so many nights waiting so long for sleep?" They never say, "It seems that life is short, but the more you contemplate eternity, the slower it turns." They never say, "I am unconvinced."

But I am unconvinced. Because I have waited a long time for this day to be over. And because I have contemplated a million things today and I remember almost none of them. Maybe my life is not short but shortened, by the thousands of days blacked out, by the millions of long deliberations and flashes of insight I thought were shaping who I am, but that now may as well have never happened.

Maybe it's the lightspeed of our synapses that makes our life feel so long, the way our thoughts hurtle backwards into untraceable darkness, faster than we can turn to watch them go.

Humanity is 500,000 years old. But what is it that our human history has left us, if each of us loses 90% of everything she ever comprised, every minute? Five thousand years of written history is just the bits of cloth and wood and dust that remained after all the people blew away.

It makes me angry, it's so overwhelmingly frightening, that though I could read everything, all the wisdom of the ages, I can still only be 25. And how sad for you, to be only 50! And how very, very sad, at 80 years old, to have gotten no older by then. And to have started over every minute, your whole life, with only a fraction of everything you held moments ago.

I guess, then, it isn't such a mystery, these frequent moments of panic, and the way I rush to the bathroom mirror to lock eyes with my own face.