“We live in biological time, and we have beginnings, middles, and ends” – Anonymous, One Thousand and One Nights

i.
it is often said that the tale of human existence is a collective yearning to break the ineluctable shackles of biological time and space. a story of fearing our molecular impermanence and longing for the herb of immortality. and how odd that is, you think, seeing as we find cellular traces of ourselves in the ephemeral elements that ground us like mushroom flesh on mossed trees emerald. how odd that is, seeing as you have loved all your beginnings and all your ends like your metamorphosing middles.

ii.
many times upon a time, you journeyed to the buzzing bustling bazaar of deep space and met many middle-creatures of biological time like yourself, women with cactus needle pierced tongues and men with eyes that seize a nebulous realism, people you observe like red-shifting data points on the event horizon. people of geodesic incompleteness who narrate themselves into the existence by whispering their transience into the lamps of genies. oh, many a genie you have dedicated to your past forms!

iii.
melodious merchants chant and electric sitars twang in a cosmic cacophony of sound. you select your favorite soundwave and glide upon it whisper light, no longer fearing the timestamp of your humanity, as jittering cities of gold and silver terraform in the galactic meadow beneath you. how blessed we are to inhabit such fleeting middles, you think.