To die.

Death is no accident. Death is no passing stroke. Death is no lottery; there are no winners.

Death is an eventuality. A commonality. A reality.

Your elderly neighbour. She thinks about this. She weeps. And she will die.

That kid on the bus. He will grow up. He will taste Life, and he will cringe. He will wither. And he will die.

That anti-Muslim dissident in the papers, to you but a few words in ink. But across the world, will he fight. He breathes. He thinks. He feels. And he dies.

Chairmen or CEOs of every company. Politicians great or not so great. Lawyers, bankers, doctors of all kinds. Religious leaders, masters of civilisation, great contributors to Mankind. Everyone respectable, everyone not so, and then everyone else.

We are a fleeting moment, a passing phase. A tiny, perishable dot in the vast cosmos of space. Our very consciousness, along with everything we have done, the friends we have made, the feelings we have regretted, the people we have loved; our Heart, our Mind, our Soul. All but an irrelevant, insignificant candle amidst a windy undergrowth; a light ray from tiny solar flare in the enormity of the Universe.

Yet we live our lives to the fullest. So do we eat, we sleep, we talk, we learn, we smile, we strive, we feel, we choose, we think, we dream, we Live. Like a single microscopic cell among the zillions on the leg of an ant, in turn among billions of his comrades, in a single ant nest in the world in all its complexity. So do we Live, and want to.

Are we mad?

No.

We are human.

There is a certain solitary silence tonight.

The sound of a gear clicking to place, and the clockwork of Time and Fate have suddenly become irreversible.

The midnight breeze smells the same as it did years ago, and there is no sadness therein. Thus tThe plates have shifted, the world has changed, yet the air is still the same.

Today, I remember my mortality.

Today, I remember my emotion, my passions, my inclinations, my decisions, my choices, my dilemmas, my personalities, my changes, mySelf.

As does a cold steel dagger pierce the heart of a mythical god, so does my immortality vanish. And once more, I am

human.

There is a certain cruelty in the air tonight, that night.

You had cast down an angel.

You had created a demon.

And so will I run free.

Azazyl

Stench of humanity,
The rot of those fair.
Despair!
Of lost sanity and
Dreams never there.