I am not isolated. I am isolation itself.

Time was a gear in my head that never made any pretense of healing all wounds, but in her weird way she comforted me with her bleak reassurances: “You are impermanent. All that you are will be nothing. All that you love will be irrelevant. All that you hate will triumph. You will die and rot and be forgotten like a hundred billion who came before you. Your footsteps will be washed away by the rains of seasons that your grandchildren will not live long enough to see.”

There are those who ask me, “Why would you take solace is such sour sentiments?”

I reply, “Would it be better that I were permanent? Everlasting to see all that I love become irrelevant? To witness the triumph of all that I hate? To watch others die and rot and be forgotten by all but me? To have my footsteps forever scar the Earth?”

In a world so rotten, mortality is the most merciful thing in all of creation.