So You Want to Live Forever

Happy October! Each year around this time we have a ritual on the Google+ social network (and twitter, and likely tumblr). Bliss Morgan invites us all to write horrible things with her as we try to sequester our nightmares on the printed page. Each day there is an image prompt to which anyone, if the spirit moves them, is free to write something. A story. A poem. A fragment of a novel. We'll have one of these each day over the month; I'll perhaps write all of them, perhaps just a few.

In any event, here's the opening. Enjoy.

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You're smart and you're clever. You pay attention to things - important things that other people miss. Little things like the dangers of GMOs and vaccines, big things about how the mind works. It's all there, sometimes out in public. Everyone sees it, some even pass it around, but not everyone is smart, not everyone is clever. So few of them think about what it all means.

You do. Of course you do. You're smart and you're clever. And you're careful.

You can live forever.

You started easy, saying hello to raw milk, goodbye to carbs. Goodbye gluten (but didn't that come with carbs anyway?) So what if your coworkers shied away from you in the break room, so what if you keeping hearing mutters about breath and body odor? Some of your diet choices are ... unusual. So what if they are, so what if they change how you smell?

It's a small price for immortality.

Not just immortality, but happiness. You're smart and you're clever. You pay attention, you know where to look, you don't miss much. For the past year you've performed compassionate meditation eight minutes a day before your glass-and-a-half of red wine. In your mind's eye the face from a never-forgotten (to tend your memory is important) face from a Save The Children television ad from decades ago, pouring eight minutes of love through his too-big eyes into his too-big head.

You're smart and you're clever. You make connections, you make the next leap. Lots of people read that speaking affirmations makes people feel worse - that telling the face in the mirror that it is smart and clever actually makes people feel dumb and slow. You took the next step.  Twelve minutes before the mirror every day, speaking reverse affirmations.

"I'm stupid. 
I'm dim. 
I'm a failure. 
I'm nothing."

Image offered with no attribution

Staring into your own stupid, dim, nothing of a failure eyes until the room fades behind you until there is nothing but you but a stupid white beacon in the dimness,  the walls are gone, the room, you are alone
(failure)
focus on your eyes until the room spins. Keep focusing (nothing).

You're clever and you're smart. Also focused, also determined.

You found the secret in the mirror, behind your anti-affirmations. You were brave enough to stare until your face was gone, your nose and lips fading to white nothingness, just the eyes and what was left of the mouth. The eyes wide with laughter. Your mouth open in a grin, lips pulling back from the teeth. 

You're clever and you're smart. You know that beneath each living face lives a deathless skull.

As your body fades, you know that what's left will live forever, here in the mirror. Your eyes.

So what if the part of you that returns to the office tomorrow and sits alone in the breakroom in its miasma of halitosis is but an empty shell? You'll live forever, here in the mirror.

The next person to look into it will see your clever mad eyes.