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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?