To Self, From Shapeshifter
Written April 25th, 2010.
Take this as a challenge.
I am Shapeshifter; I am anything, but never everything. I am a void spitting sparks on a meteoric course from point to point, skin to skin, a streak of blacker-on-black, an emptiness more hollow than space itself. I am a furrow dug through space-time. You can know my path by the shells I leave behind and the haphazard smattering of memories painted on the insides of the walls. Poke an eye inside and see a fractured facet of my history.
Leave me fly. To stop is to die; to stay is to freeze. Without the shift, there is but the shape alone, and static stagnancy is worse than ascending to death. I am the embodiment of change; rebirth, entropy, repeat. I am the slow decay the time brings, and I am the ashes left of the phoenix's nest. Each new life is my truth lie, and all the shed skins left behind are stories that I may have lived or may have merely heard from another. I am a momentary aspect of myself, and I have disconnected from all I was before.
My core is nothingness, skinless and shapeless, pH-neutral water to fill the vase of my choosing. I have no mind but that of my skin; I have no instincts but those of my body. I am change, intrinsically lacking identity, without a consciousness; I am a primal impulse of nature, pushing through the paper-flimsy synaptic network to move. I am the unstoppable force housed in a transient, fragile skin that cannot hold me - I overflow and drown my own host in my essence.
I say to you again: take this as a challenge. Try to bear my infinite weight, my impossible lightness. Try to embody me without losing yourself.
Try to breathe my water.