Embers

I really should not be alive right now.

It should've ended in 2003. I should've been another statistic. Metal burned into rock. Blood outlasted by stone.

The thinnest of margins. Like becoming your own ghost. Abyssal void of the shadow-world. Formless, immiscible. 

Rescued by accident. An outsider to the empire, looking in, saw value in my words. More than value: the gleam of a horizon.

Like other sensitive souls, I could sense the death of the Empire, but could not name it, put the thing into words. Like most intellectuals, I blamed myself. Despair compounded by imperial hubris, replicating each speculative spiral of the shadow banking system with the egoism of a shadow concept-system. Baudelaire named the contradiction, without understanding it: "mon semblable, mon frere", the false equality proclaimed by the Second Emperor, the fiat identity-currency of imperial Orientalism.

Not the route I chose (or was chosen by).

What I have left are the memories of that despair. Still faintly glowing, like embers. Wreathed in ash, but they still burn to the touch. Waiting for the moment to spark anew.