Collective

I Am a Collective I am a collective, active, inactive, suggestive and elusive. I am a collective, thirty-six billion cells to prove it to you. I am all that made me, I am all that unmade me. I am all that prepared me, I am all that I have tried, I am all that has repaired me. I am sometimes without fervor, often without rancor. I am all those I have loved, all those I have pushed away, avoided, bypassed, all those I have inhabited and all those who have haunted me. I did not make myself alone, yet I was born alone, and I will die alone. And it is I who will lay down roots of ginseng, flowers of clover, sprigs of rosemary upon my shroud. Afterward, they may bury me, cremate me, aquamate me, mummify me, scatter me. I will have sown enough of my humanity, worn out enough soles of my shoes to be forgotten, to let peel away my faded thoughts along the streams of this humanity. I am a collective. I am all that made me, I am all that unmade me. And when we evaporate, shall we reincarnate, resurrect, or simply wither away, disperse across the Milky Way? I am a collective, pensive, discursive, persuasive and dissuasive, adrift on a fragile skiff, yet always a collective.