The finale

Does it even matter? When a candle burns out and all that is left is that lingering tendril of smoke. And although you know that this continues into infinity, infinity is not something you can perceive even in that singular moment of happiness you have bottled up in your mind. It ends. It fades when your life ends. And maybe it is as they say. Maybe your entire history does flash before you as intensely as a technicolour cartoon. But, also, maybe it fades like the remnants of a dream that your mind grapples with to recall upon waking. You claw at it as only a wave struggles to hold on to the shore. But until it freezes over, as it might, but never will, but maybe... until then, it is simply lost. It is, hopefully, recycled into that pool of dreams and realities of existing life - a remake - the actors change yet the plot remains the same. And maybe, like that wisp of smoke, you linger as well; now everywhere as a gas is everywhere. And maybe you can see everything and other things you have never (until now, that is) been able to. And maybe you are able to see how some other being has taken your story and lived it better. And now you know with poignant certainty that you were wrong, as you forever will be. Was it despair? Was it then apathy? Was it, finally, an utter, terrible sense of contentment that made you think that you were brave enough to leap without the harness? We who are left to ponder may even find some degree of comfort in attempting to break it down into stages, a series of logical decisions, without which, creatures such as ourselves seem to be left floundering... as if the universe (in its infinite magnitude) can be summarized into a pattern.  And maybe we can use the sciences and maths and better minds to feel a little less helpless, a little less insignificant.  But the truth is that we (like you, like a million others such as you or I, and what we do and what you have done) are but tawdry remakes of the past.  Vanity has ever been our nature... that primal need to be beyond mere existence.  So we tell stories of the times we lived and the times we loved, and the times we lost; sometimes true, often false, often glazed with literature, as if any of it truly matter, as if the echoes of our voices are loud enough to last an eternity... as if we can be as stars (but even the light of stars die).   And sometimes when we tell them well enough, they are remembered by those we leave behind, but often they change nothing.   Vanity... when we dress up the earth with flowers and monuments of those who now are as inconsequential as a speck of dust on the vase by the window.  Truly we know that there is nothing more needless than an epitaph or a eulogy but to allow us a moment to be less afraid of the utter pointlessness of it all when it ends.

Did you find that poets have rendered a lot more profundity to death than it, in reality, has? Was it as sweet as the songs profess?  Or did you panic in that final fleeting moment when you realized for sure that the ripples made by your dramatic dip into that ocean of oblivion were no different from those left by many others when they did not cancel each other out? Or had your apathy run so deeply that there was nothing but silence? And just as quietly as you left, so do we remember you in silence... until the natural loudness of living wakes us from our stupor, until once again we forget the irony of life.