The moon has arisen on the desert beyond the Judea and it is waxing existential. The religion of death and resurrection is buried now on the roadside, back there aways, because I never met Him on my journey to Damascus. I left my faith when its immutable threads became too moth-eaten to shroud that horrible truth: this life is all we've got.
I will never live long enough to learn everything I wish to. Were it that I could spend eternity lounging in my armchair, feasting upon words like a bushel of Fuji apples. I would fill my belly with botanical brunches, devour mathematical massala, munch Humean ham sandwiches and Socratic scones. But instead of reveling in an everlasting bacchanalian of books, I scarf wisdom like a starving man, hardly bothering to chew, much less taste, pressing centuries of patient wisdom into gaping maw, choking down calcified aphorisms and slippery syllogisms, squeezing enlightenment past incisors, canines, and molars. May I die bloated and hungry because this life is all I've got.
I will die starving. Despite the monotonous beeping of the machines, despite the insistence of family and nurses, despite my own grating desire to pass in a field of wild wheat, I will die wishing I discovered more willingly the beauty of moss and mosquitoes.
What was it like when Luna first became our world's lover? How far should we trace their story? Was it when Terra and Luna first began to court, two great masses in the emptiness of space, swinging round and round the tiny dance floor of our solar system? Was it when she was belched out of Terra's skin, an 'ishshah to that 'adam, made from the very dust of our home? Was it when she was the mere twinkle in the great eye of some long dead star, a product of nuclear fusion in some distant end of our galaxy? If only I could ask her! String a tin can from here to there and whisper secret adorations for her pockmarked face and too pale skin and perhaps she might confess that despite her 4.527 billion years, (give or take .010 billion years), she still loves to dance, but she too worries what will happen when she's gone.
