Life. A Beginning and An End. People claimed that neither mattered. What mattered was The Story in between.
He had no Story. Just endless pages filled with nonsense and punctuations; questions, exclamations, semi colons and commas.
He had turned 50 two years ago. Seven years to catch his mother. Nine years to catch his father. If he was lucky he would reach 65. He did not believe in luck. Or fate. Or destiny.
What did he believe in? G-d. Yes. Yet what that mattered in the long or short of it, he had no idea.
Death. The End. No more scribblings on the wall. The last page, a PERIOD, then nothing.
That did not scare him. Either there was a grand new adventure meeting him beyond the last page or there was nothing, not even a Yod.
Regrets. Nah. He had done what he had done because it had been before him at every turn, and he must pass through, whether he liked it or not.
Most he had not liked. What he had liked had been brief and soon lost to the inevitable conclusions of events. Looking back he thought of a shadow moving between dim lanterns through Darkness.
There were no maps in Darkness. No Landmarks to navigate by. No Stars to give even the semblance of a Universe. Still he had navigated there. The dim lanterns had never been visible at a distance. Out of nowhere there they were, in his face, and then they were not. Like fireflies.
Here and there along the way there had been small campfires and bonfires. He had even had a few campfires and bonfires of his own.
His wedding. That had glowed for miles, and it still glinted in his mind.
The first time he had sex after his transition. His first shot of T.
But that had been it. The rest had been probing and picking at Darkness from lantern to lantern. A shadow moving through Darkness. Just a speck of dark greyness against the blurred and undefined landscape.
Who had he been? Had he left behind splotches of himself behind at the campfires he had visited? Part of him wanted that to be the case. Another part of him wanted to be just a shadow passing through Darkness unnoticed. That way no one would grieve once he stepped off the road at The End.
The question kept nagging him: Who had he been? If he had been the sum of his own memories, he had been nothing to write about.
Perhaps who he had been was not for him to decide? Maybe who he had been was the sum of of the memories of the others around the campfires?
Perhaps he had been both at the same time?
Like someone drifting into a black hole. In 3rd-person view incinerated at the event horizon; in 1st-person view floating calmly in toward the singularity.
Would that be an accurate metaphor for Death?
To others his cessation in fire at the rim of the black hole at the end. To him a silent drifting beyond the rim into the black hole at the end. Into the singularity at the center of the the black hole. Was that what G-d Was? The singularity at the center of his existence?