What are we, but soft machines bearing witness to themselves? ​

 

Ask the butcher. She’s disassembled countless bodies piece by piece, entire systems cut to slick portions and held steady in her pitying eye. The mechanisms, each useless without the whole, unfurled and flattened out like a map -

 

Here.

 

I’ve prepared you a feast. I’ve picked the ripest of my fears, stewed in the dread of upcoming death, until a grief sloughed off, shrieking loud as a live birth.

 

Take. Eat. My body, broken

 

for who?

 

It doesn’t save; it isn’t divine. Still

 

feast with me, in remembrance. Remember that we are animals. We are successors to pioneers who made leaps from single cells to multicellularity. From sentience to complex thought.

 

Remember that throughout our lives we watch our bodies deteriorate into eventual failure. So imperceptibly slow at first, then faster and faster.

 

Remember death.

 

Remember now. Remember that we all have a smell and a taste and a name, that a swell of joy is capable of revving the muscles into dance.

 

Remember that we are growing collections of last times.

 

Feast with me. This is the last life we will ever live.