What makes me

I am the product of evolution,

the sum, no more, of three billion or so parts but never whole; a mirror of seven billion faces, minds, hearts, far flung places etched as faint traces, recalled as memories but never unchanged. I hear your words, I echo your thoughts, I see your smiles, I feel your joy. I touch your skin and a calcium wave courses through my finger to my brain; forever changed. I am the product of thirty one years, the sum, no more, of forty trillion or so cells but never whole; no picture reflects my troubled soul, as with the years I age each cellular replication is fraught with decay, my telomeres decline, my chromosomes fray. I will no longer recognise myself, one day. And who am I? The longest lived of all my cells, seven years, no more. What’s left of who I was before but the epigenetic imprints? Etched as faint traces, recalled as memories but never unchanged. I am amorphous; my cells merely obey what’s written in my DNA, the stimuli that pass their way, yet my brain is soft as clay. I was never born this way. I am the smell of sizzling fat, the thrilling sound of a thunder crash, the fixation of a lightning flash, the desolation of a grave. I am every laugh, every tear, each and every triumph and fear; the manifestation of all I see and hear; forever changed. I am the sands of time, the drift of mutations, epigenetic methylations, a vessel for each revolution’s chance situations, certain only that I will one day decline but heartened to understand: that’s fine.