I see the moustache he wore on the faces of strangers. They're different skulls, different faces, but the features are a memory summoned by adjacent genetics. Ultimately, there are only so many combinations of A T G C.
If humanity proliferates far enough, it is plausible, though highly unlikely that we encounter twins not from the same womb. They will never be him. Genetics aside I think that even if there was a complete and total match, it would simply be just like Walter Benjamin mused.
There would be a lack of presence, a lack of essence, and the lack of the original elemental individual. You may have an identical object or body, but its place in time and space will vary, removing it further from the moustache grown by he.
Yet, my memory is a lattice of unconnected events, temporal slices of experience arranged in biological substance. Volatile storage. When my battery runs out it vanishes unless it is transmuted through other means to any of the strangers that surround me. Are they also entities with the same thought patterns and different solutions to the problem of memory? I am but a temporary processing unit with contemporary storage of some vast, unfolding interconnected system?
How and way do I matter?.
Our genetics are a contagion, our memories and experiences the pus of resolved of organic biological loops upon our duplicating genetic material.
Error after error causes us to blame age. Time, decay and the consequence of the earlier encounters and flourishes in the light scar our underlying structures. The darkness too leaves its fickle mark, for our body reminds us of a perpetual want does not cease with the song of a setting star. The body itself s a continuum through what we perceive as linear.
No matter what I do yesterday to propel myself through the next day, I must repeat the process daily, or perish. The very notion that a star in the distance seems to control these mundane biological requirements is a cause for great concern, because one day, they will all become extinguished, and what happens at that point are irreconcilable injuries to a universe incompatible with supporting our corporeal form.
No new particles. No new matter. An empty darkness. Not even an echo. No forensics, for there will be nowhere to examine or anyone to inspect. Before that eventuality unfolds, I do wait for the stranger on the street with the moustache he used to wear to be.the manifestation of the foreigner in my mind.
For it to once more be the man I knew, the one controlling the shuddering motor with foot and pedal onward to inevitable outcomes both individual and collective.
Unavoidable. But perhaps through these rambling words I can implore you to ask that among the unfathomable vastness of our world, of our universe, of our observational skill, we can perhaps seek out the parallel: the other worlds that exist alongside our own and perhaps we can transition into their realm, a hopeless, temporary escape to borrow time from their beyond. I assume that their stars, too will one day fade.
Perhaps each universe is a single cell in a vast, retching, coughing lung. Not that of a sleeping giant, but that of a frenzied forthing madman dying in a gutter a London street, another victim of consumption.
Still, my search continues for that man wearing the moustache.The man that was once my father.
