The Phoenix

I am the past, and the future.  I am an echo that travels in both directions.  I am reborn, the Phoenix, the same each time and altogether different.  Sometimes five years, others fifty.  And I remember.  The past is a mantle I wear, one that speaks to me, mocks my helplessness.  The cycle consumes me, becomes me.  I rise, live and fly only to fall again and again.  I flee from the life I led, and will lead again, only to be remade from the ashes.  Always remade, reborn.  Connections are severed, but new ones will replace them.  I think that I must have been human, for I bewilder myself just as they do.  We share the same insatiable desire to belong together.  To fit together.  But they have the guarantee of closure, of a final answer.

I do not return from whence I came, except for now.  This time, I cannot explain why, but I have fled, fallen, and come again.  I circle now, in shadow and secret.  Stalking, I observe.  They are changed.  Though I have been thoroughly remade, they are the ones who are different.  I am who I always was, they have become who they were going to be.  Yet for me, they are only who they were.  The memory stalks me, as I stalk them.  I am their past too.  The ghosts of what once was are my retinue, and I the eternal king of memory.  Of the dead past.

Where they have grown, as humans do, I turn circles.  My fractal personality only repeats itself.

I have not been away long, but I only recognise what I remember.  The names and faces are the same, but the people that carry them have gone far and wide.  I did not witness these changes, I only see the results, through the fog of my memories.  The sometimes, often, opaque fog across my eyes.  I can only detect the traces of the presents that wreaked their effects, they seem like so many fairy tales.  To me the past is more real, the past that I now wear.  The past that is, to them, so distant.

Why have I returned this time?  What connection binds me here?  Of course, the past.  But that past belongs to someone else.  Who I am now and who I was then have never met, though we are one and the same.  How can I hope to return, when the shape of all things has changed?  I do not fit.  I am of a different age, removed from the ravages of their time, I have not worn smooth like they have.

Yet…

Here I am, now.  The past is with me, and affects me.  I did not have the memories then, that I do now.  I cannot be the creature I used to be, for that reason alone.  How have I changed?  My centre feels unmoved, yet some changes must have occurred.  I am older, I have seen things I had not seen.  Heard things I had not heard.  I know what I did not know.

Do I live in the past, or the present?  Do I know myself, or but the memory of myself?  Perhaps this is the reason, I see the changes in others but refuse to admit that I myself have changed.  How do I measure it?  How do I be sure of it?

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