Artwork by Jacob Van Blarcom

We live in the age of miracles, we live in the age of exhaustion. We are always just one more lover away from true love, or we’d had it and lost it before we even knew what it was and who it was we were holding. We wake up tired, we wake up to check our phones. We care too much about sports teams and too little about each other.

We stand together completely isolated and alone. It is the age of loneliness and manual orgasms. It is the age where everything seems to have ended just before we were born. We drift through days looking for that peak experience that we can use to justify our lives. We’re headachey and hurt, we’re tired all the time. We’ve seen so much we just need one more photo if we could just find the view but everything has been seen before and better with a different filter and a different girl anyhow. We’re cutting and pasting, our scrapbook careers. Show me the highlights reel of your ten favourite photocopiers. Tell me about the difference you made. The emptiness of knowing everything we change can’t change anything. The age of emptiness, of knowing the emptiness of anything we ever get to hold. And you, you aren’t any different, I saw you looking in the mirror at the lines cracking across your face. Looking back at me. I would love to hold you and tell you everything would be ok but we’re beyond fairytales, we’re beyond myths. We’re Narcissus drowning in self doubt.

Weren’t we the miracle children, the ones who’d get to see it all? All we seem to have is solitude in the multitudes. All life is a losing game. We talk so calmly about such awful things, weighing the reality against the dream that something called love could save us.

But then that song plays, or that bird sings, and I know I’ve been here all before and when I turn back someday into soil it’s only to begin again, that bit more blessed. Each time a small step closer to the Infinite. The ageless energy beneath my skin. the ageless atoms. we’re never really alone. We are infinite.

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Written by Martin Edwards

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