They say that a whale’s corpse leads to the bursting of life on the ocean floor.

  Am I already dead?

  I feel like I am breaking.

  Small pieces of me fke off, pursuing their own paths.

  I pick at my ‘self,’ grind bits off here, tearing pieces off there. Some begin moving, experiencing on their own. Other pieces stay lifeless and still.

  The biological cogs of myself swirl and push and turn to allow perception of what I consider ‘myself,’ if such a thing exists.

  I am not quite sure what ‘I’ am, but I do know that I am something.

  And that ‘something’ that makes up ‘me’ is changing.

  Of course, I had changed before. I had become hot and then cooled, been young and then old, passionate and then dull.

  I had been finding ‘myself’ cumbersome recently.

  As more and more pieces fke off, I am unperturbed. Perhaps I will be shaped into a smaller and lighter thing, ridding me of the horrible dragging feeling that comes with my mass.

  A week passes.I assist the pieces in leaving me. May we be happier apart. I feel little stirring of what might have been the corpse of joy.

  A month passes.I am half my original mass, that is my most recent mass, that is the greatest mass I had come to be, as up until now I had only become bigger.

  A year passes.I feel a pulsating in my core. I would have once called this fear. I thought I would become lighter and more ‘real.’ Instead, I do not know how much of me was ever ‘me.’

  Another half year goes.Where do my thoughts come from? At which point is there none of me left?

  And so the second half of the second year goes.Do those bits of what was once me know what ‘I’ am?

  Would they be comforted to know that I mourn for them?

  Another year gone.I still exist. I do not know how. I feel hollow, my heart having fled. Perhaps this is punishment for not utilizing it.

  Years continue to pass.More and more of me flees, to what purpose I do not know. They never return.

  Sometimes I wish they would, if only to take a bit more with them. Do they not desire a greater share of what ‘I’ was?

  Do the corpse worms of the gods weep for the flesh they devour?

  If so, they would be more feeling than these fkes of mine.

  Although, why would they want to have more of ‘me’? Even I did not want me.

  Now I cannot tell whether the parts that have left were superfluous or all that I had. Did I ever know? Did I ever care? I do not know. Maybe that part of me has already left.

  My perception betrays me. I know not how much time passes. Perhaps that never mattered anyway. I am much silkier now. I am no longer cogs, more of oil’s kin. I seem to hear bits of what once was me. They seem livelier. I hear them as echoes in the depths of a cave, as memories barely recalled upon waking, as sensations described from one lifeform to another: transient, fleeting, barely real.

  But I am the one barely real.

  Maybe I never was.

  Do the corpses of gods cry for themselves or for the worms doomed to eat them?

  I do not know.

  But they would be more feeling than I.

  I never cried.