the stone of triumph

I awoke one day to find I'd been corporealized and jacketed in human flesh. The body was hollowed of the ghost until a year and a half or so after its expulsion from the place where it had grown; until that time, I thought the whole human frame was too weak and would jeopardize the odds of a lengthy endurance here. Only after the bones fused to the protest of cartilaginous soft spots did I see the error of a hasty entrance minimized. I wanted to feel the whole network of biological apparatuses expand and change, but only once a basic phase of structural integrity had been attained which came, as I said, after a year and a half. Adaptation was fairly challenging, and the avoidance of childhood’s trappings of odds demanded talent and not luck, on which I originally planned to depend. I put the years of existence behind my heels like so many miles, and the rapidity of time’s current kept increasing until I regrettably accepted the pace of the clock and began to count the potential hours remaining, rather than blissfully ignoring the flying minutes to the point of refusing to acknowledge their passing or existence. That was the first crushing strike dealt to my physical world, flagging forever the start of a long line of realizations which exposed the unsettling minutia of this role as a human being. I don’t mourn the numbers of my ill-favored revelations, but they do serve to substantiate this whole endeavor of a nonplussed navigation of this world in this body; I am grateful for it but dejected by it on occasion. So I became accustomed to the senses and sensations of a life beneath vulnerable tissues, underwent the developmental processes which brought concomitant social changes, strove to satisfy a whole host of expectations, personal and otherwise, until at last I reached the panacea of plateau and could rest my battered dimensions. And so here I still sit behind the scythe of passing moments, cutting down with care and regard the present experience to fortify a richness of history, whose value is not entirely certain but will be a reward of memory when the time arrives to fly the frame and sweep my spirit from this beloved machine.