Tabula Rasa

It ends again.
I walk away or am forced to run.
Sometimes I am shown the door
…or thrown out of a window…
if I’m lucky enough to merit some brief excitement.

Usually I’m not.

Me -
nameless, faceless one,
forgotten as soon as I make my exit,
always on the heels of some unbidden trauma:
sudden death or drawn out disease.
Everything ends.
But I keep perishing long before I flatline:
my life a constant stream of annihilating erasures,
an ever unfinished novel
scribbled on a few sheets of dry erase pages.

I only need a few.
Long before I reach chapter two
they will manage to be left out in the rain.

I am a blank slate,
Not a word or phrase to define me.
No tattoo can I show you:
no tribal allegiance ever etched itself so deeply into my skin.
There is nothing to mark where I’ve been, to whom I have belonged,
no faith, not even a name.

I cannot tell you who I am,
Only that I am,
and someday I will cease to be.
For now I breathe, and nothing more.

We meet the same fate eventually,
but I envy the illusion of security
bestowed upon those who cross the finish line
still owning their own adjectives,
a sense of self until the final exhalation.

I never embraced impermanence,
But it embraced me.
So my life ever remains a front and back cover,
with naught but empty pages in between.