Dead Lives Matter

I've always been someone who has seen my cup half-full. So today I look around and say to myself it could be worse. For instance, I could be one of the living.

But now that I've caught this plague, this merciful blessing, I guess that means I'm dead.

Living dead. And just today, mind you. And tonight will be my first, if you'll pardon the cultural reference, night of living dead.

Hunger. I am so very, very hungry. But it's not the pit of my stomach. It is the urge-become-essence. Now I understand, albeit vaguely. I'm from dust and to dust I shall return, so I want to consume the living, because that is all part of my return to the dust, the beautiful, calming, sacred dust.

I hunger for living, which no longer resides in this body. What has become of me? I used to be a professional of the living, but today I have no memory of what that means. Yesterday and quite out of reach now, vague remembrances of architecture, right-angles, protractors, and blueprints elude me like the non-sequiturs of a dream—fleeting thoughts with slippery handles of which I cannot gain purchase.

Mosquitoes--who knew? Micro-transfusions from the recently dead or soon-to-be-dead to the living. In the small mosquito gut there is a change, chemistry, and alchemy, and the next bite always carries a novel venom.

The living dead know that now, of course--vaguely, dimly. Just one bite. That's all. Just one. A swat that created a tiny blotch of red on my arm. Foolish mosquitoes, depleting their own supply of free-flowing blood. Not to worry about the time-honored mosquito, though—there are more to take the place of any imbiber which is not afraid to die on any living arm or calf or neck. Giving its life to spread its disease. Not satisfied with malaria, yellow fever, or dengue, they spread the new pestilence, and I have contracted it, moving hungrily in my fever dream.

Others, like me, suddenly suffer the void that must be satisfied. On my way to becoming the dust that begot me, I hunger for more than the gossamer I have become.

I want living protein, thermogenic fat, and catecholamines. The amino acid pairs of my DNA are dropping like flies and this engenders my hunger at the deepest levels of my being. Some of the living offer the base pairs I need, others offer ones I don't. In the next hour it may be the opposite. I pass this one but I lash out at that one, depending on whether I need an adenine/thymine or a cytosine/guanine. I cannot determine which I need in any moment; my hunger does. If the wrong-living are all I have to choose from, I pass and go hungry and the living do not understand, seeing my pursuit as random, chaotic, without reason. But it is simply biology. Simple biomortology. Biomortality.

I came from dust, and it is to dust I will return. I need the dust of others—living others. I merely shorten their wait, for it is all dust at the end of the day, and our day has come. It is the new symbiosis:

The living sustain the dead while the dead provide the dust ahead of schedule.

It is the natural history of the planet. A life cycle, if such an irony can stand. I want to consume the living, because that is all part of our return to the dust, the beautiful, calming, sacred dust.

Delicious is the dust of the living. How sating to glut on them. The living run from us to avoid our bites, clawings, or scratches, but it is not just our bites, clawings, or scratches that metamorphose them. There is a co-factor—the mosquito attracted by the breach of their skin, who knows how sating it is to glut on them. The unswatted ones fly off to alight on another recently bitten, clawed, or scratched with their novel venom. If I could align my inanimate synapses in any orderly way, I would appreciate it as a beautiful life cycle. But my musings are cold, vague, and anemic.

My new life is to bring others to the dust. Consuming them, we can go together. Where the living might say that being consumed means they will rot with me, I say we will make our beds in the dust together. Until the light comes down. Until the very elements of our bodies are one with our world. Forever, or until the cataclysm spews all of us back out to walk in the dust of distant places.

The dust has ten billion billion stories. There is room for more, so come to me. We will go to the dust together and we will finally find our infinite glory and happiness. Dust lives forever.

But you aim high with your guns, decapitate with your axes, bludgeon our heads. Why? I should know. I used to do the same before my mosquito went on its sortie. Aren't we motes all in this dust-sweeping together? Why can't we all just get along? Would it kill you to allow us our Holy Thursday suppers? Respect for the life cycle is its own reward.

Please know that dead lives matter.