If I Could Hold Forever

Twice I have felt my body try to leave me, once as a child who didn't understand, once as an adult feeling my own blood flow, mapping new territories across surgical sheets, my fingers going numb at the edges like a photograph fading in reverse. Some will say that the brush with death should make you grateful, and God, I am, I really am, but it also made me greedy, made me starving. I want centuries to dive beneath the waves, to drown in the deepest trench of the ocean and wake up on a planet with three suns, to taste fruits that haven't been named yet and food that doesn't exist yet, to touch skin that isn't human, hear music from a civilization we haven't met. I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of the after, the nothing. The loss of this. What if there's no more heat on my skin? The loss of warm water caressing my form, the absence of texture, of flavor, of fragrance, of someone saying my name, no more sting of cold air in my lungs, no more ache in the chest when the music swell? No more feeling? What if death is just amputation of every sense I've ever had... no touch, no taste, no sound, just me, alone in the dark, reaching for something and finding my hands are gone too? I want to live long enough to run out of want, to exhaust every ocean, every star, to love so many times I lose count, to make art until my hands forget what it's like to be still. So I'm greedy. I press my mouth to life like I'm trying to drink it dry. I want more years, more worlds, more sensations than this one fragile body can hold. But my body keeps count, keeps reminding that the clock is ticking. It remembers the coldness creeping in, the way everything can end mid-sentence, and still I reach for more, still I press my face to the glass of this one brief, burning life, wanting to see everything. Not because I'm special, but because one lifetime isn't nearly enough to feel everything I need to feel before the lights go out. Mizuyōkaii, 2025