Once I was six or five years old and did things kid backward like I do them grown backward now and I remember one day doing my six or five year old backward best to ponder nonexistence because it struck me ponderably, little ponderable thing I was barely getting used to existing and ponderance in the first place, sitting on the floor of his father’s room, over by the table at the bedside—remember?—maybe flipping through one of his pilot dad’s aviation magazines by the light of the bedside lamp, that antique-store-strange white-painted metal lamp with the ornate key-shaped switch like a wick knob you’d find on one of those kerosene contraptions like the one my aunt gave me because I like the idea of things and you had to turn that ornate key-shaped switch on the antique-store-strange lamp for the electricity to ignite, a functional piece of creative anachronism in a hodgepodge sort of room where I liked to go to play, that day chance pondering upon what it would mean to die. Well, not die, but to be dead. I swear I wasn’t a morbid little soul, I just had a bit of a ruminative side. Thankfully I grew out of that and I no longer think anymore, about anything.

I remember it vividly—I’m only making 32.3% of this up—thinking the thought first and letting it settle, unthinking, the great blank and empty, sensing for a moment the fringes of complete nothingness as if through static, white noise overtaking, touching a little corner of the only thing that never really ends.

Just barely, just for a bit, then sounds around again, thoughts back, signal lost. But the residue of that unfathomably liberative profundity lingered and has stuck to me ever since.

It’s a good damn thing that life doesn’t last, although I still wish to touch eternity. I once thought that was a good sentence to start something with. Like a paragraph. Now I think maybe that’s what this is all about, all this wordplay and sitting detached-attached wrapped in thoughts trying to lose myself in greater than me, better, more, bigger, older, stranger, more enduring than me, beyond thought, to be anything but bodily-bound me because bodily-bound me has limitations, beautiful, wonderful, terrible, shitty limitations and in my limited way I think—ha—what a thing it would be to be nothing and show everyone who has accused me of overthinking that when I stop, I stop, and I don’t know who the joke’s on then. But what a dream, in the nighttime maybe mare sense. Maybe I’ve been hooked since I was six or five. A dream to be exempt, sort of, so apart I could feel it all and feel it all at once as full brimming terrifying void. To cede self and pass from the fray, to leave behind the only means available of knowing that which is beyond the ponderificable reach that lets me imagine such boundlessness in the first place, to let all that go and pass into and become nothing but that great cold clarity and quiet I felt that day as a kid when I asked my dad what it meant to die and he turned off the light and the moment expired.