I'm standing at the edge of the cliff. Warm yellow rays twirl inside the lighthouse and illuminate the brume that scatters itself amidst the sea spread out before me. We are all strangers. I say, to my mind, my brain. I am one too, an imposter, who replaced the person that breathed in this body yesterday. And tomorrow, someone will be next to take on this role. It’s inevitable, we shift and run and turn and spin in attempts to recover what is lost to the waves of time. Believing to have grasped answers, we fake whispers. And I’d heard them late into the night, in a pitch-black solemn place, where I contemplated the truth behind these invisible chains that bind us.

My stomach churns, when I try to recall the straight demeaning angles of the white room; it reminds me of moments I do not wish to repeat.

They will replace me.

I am disposable.

It is with these thoughts that I've come here, the fear, of never truly knowing.

I don't want to lose myself, which is why perhaps, I should cease to exist as this self. Yet, here I remain, my chattering teeth clinking; an orchestra in tune with my now trembling legs that dance in this cold and lonely venue. My fingers have warped into icicles. My lungs, they will not listen. My throat, it is constricted, it hurts; and a brief thought about choking to death right then and now arises in my guts.

And I want to laugh at it all, at the skin that mocks me, as it howls along to my own despicable song.

I gulp but there is nothing to swallow, for my mouth is too dry and my body too empty, my will to love it's gone; I could not seize it even if I tried. For my love, is not tender moments, affairs and passion beneath sheets in a cheap motel room with desperate departures six months later. It is fascination, magic, bewilderment for naught but one; and I’ve misplaced all twenty of them.

I peer down. Sharp rocks battle for my attention. I try to imagine how grotesque this end to a beginning who’d never truly departed will be, if anyone were to discover my body; how their reactions would turn.

Would it be a child?

Would he recall my decaying, maggot-filled corpse for the rest of his life?

Or would he let the strangers take over, because it would be too much?

Nature roars at my skin. She makes me feel all that I could not, in a life that was not mine to live. If someone were to ask why, I’d shout: Why not? If they were to insist, I’d retort the question: Why? And it would confuse them, and I would think good, because I am also lost and there are no horizons for people who wander.