Last night I laid down in my bed and stared death in the eye. It has this small that is face-to-face with you always. It’s one of our first great tricks to forget that it’s always looking at us.

We make up stories and explanations to comfort ourselves in the face of our inadequacy of understanding. We don’t know what happens to the energy. We do know that it isn’t destroyed, but we don’t know where it goes. And what goes with it.

I’ve thought about the dreams where people reach you and the feeling— weight itself in the dream is different when they are in it. That is no longer a flimsy thing Your brain has conjured, but something that has gone beyond you.

I believe this is what Memento Mori truly means. Or what it serves to teach you.

You cannot brush away the knowledge that death lingers beyond— and that we don’t know what it is, except for everything we know it is not.

For all my lip service, I had forgotten the single immutable fact.

I don’t get to do this again. Not like this. I will never redo this life.