Will I outlast anything?

When does an experience end? Because every butterfly-wing hurricane sensation, memory, contemplation, intake of breath, doesn't it drip into that great turbulent pool of consciousness? Each experience climbing onto each other, increments of sediment, or ripples upon ripples, until the pool is like a stream, a river, entirely ripples, and maybe that's all a river is.

And you can't lose it. Can't escape it. Each history upon history built into your bones. The boy and the girl by the cave, so long ago, one waving a stick tipped with embers. Never passed.

Sometimes though, it feels less like a pool or a river, more like a cascade. Just slipping out of reach. Pouring off in splatters and sprays and trickles and intangible mists. How can I hold onto that? Do I want to? What am I without my own particular poison? My dim, smouldering lights?

But I lose track of that thought too. Just gone. Slipped off, away, away. Maybe that's why I write. I can't hold everything together in this patched and leaking skull. Not alone, with my bare, cupped hands. Freeze some of it here, hope that by the time it melts someone else has understood at least something of it. Which would be more than I understood.

But I still lose I.
By and by.
 

So I end it, before it ends.