The picture under my bio is my favorite of me. I like it because it was one of those rare moments in photography capturing a moment of my personality.  Free, wild, funny, playful, contemplative, dreamer. Most of the photos of me, I don’t recognize the person smiling with that painful contorted expression known as the pose. It takes talent not to pose, to dream of something else, to be far away but present. Portraits are for Dreamers, Gods, and Kings. Everything else is fashion modeling.

I like the picture so I use it. I keep thinking I should get a professional photo taken, but will be unhappy with the results. Have I changed all that much in appearance? Why should that matter?

I have used the photo as my profile image on some of those dating websites. It turns out the photo was a source of my success and failure.  The complaint, often read, is that a person should use an up to date photo.  False advertising.  It’s amusing but also sad. The surface, the superficial is the thing most desired: but that’s not how you look now! No, but it’s how I am. I am every bit that person captured in the photo and more. One would find that out if they spent time with me.

Desire and attraction – the only glue that binds us, always receding into the past. It is easily unraveled at the first sign of adversity. The inevitable crisis. We love only after that crisis. Survival forces us to the depths, to find love. Unraveling love is a much harder feat. It requires some deeper cleaving that manages to kill what had once survived together.

It confirms my belief that we do not truly age. Or rather, what we call aging is simply the unraveling / revealing of the past, not the movement of time forward. We have no future, only history. It can’t be otherwise. Otherwise, and we are left with infinities, the absurdity that a body is destroyed each second it passes through time. It leaves no possibility of survival. It is why we have a  physics of motion, but no physics of the substructure of that movement in space-time, not yet anyway.

The picture is the only proof I have of this concept. Not an erasing. Not an elegy, but a living breath. We are not spread across time but linger forever inside its harmonics. We take a superficial view and see in time only death, the killer of souls. We must go deeper, survive this impression of ourselves forever dying. Only then can we build something that endures.