Me. I look at my name on the cancelled checks returned to me, and I wonder who that is –me. I see me as though from afar, as if everything I know of as me is a memory –a remembrance of flesh once animated; a fond recognition of a distant life, in which pulse and scent were too familiar to be noticed, from a perspective where I have neither. I imagine fondly remembering pain, and breath, and hunger, and all the host of physical, temporal preoccupations that came with having a body. I picture –or rather, percieve evanescently– the latter-me wondering quizically how the embodied-me could have failed to exploit all the fascinations raised by the curiosity of being both physical and spiritual at once. How did I go through that with eyes, but unaware? With a warm throbbing heart and exquisite nerves, but unfeeling? With needs, both ferocious and delicate, with desires both fleeting and unending, and with appetites both excruciatingly insatiable and sumptuously fed, and with me all the while unforgivably unconscious?
It is too late. Light is beginning to overtake this spot in the northern hemisphere, creeping up over this place on earth from the East-northeast. Every summer night, the sun sleeps briefly, lightly, just beyond the northern woods, never fully surrendering its influence over the sky, never completely abandoning us. In the summer, at these latitudes where I have lived this life, the northern sky stays a faintly luminous deep, deep blue. It is the warmth of every Summer night.