Beautiful-portraits

There exists, in the obscure margins of human contemplation, a recurrent heresy: that death may be defeated rather than merely endured. It is a notion not born of ignorance, but of excessive lucidity—an intellect staring too long into the abyss until the abyss begins to resemble a solvable equation. In the city of Virelith, whose architecture was said to imitate the geometry of thought itself, there lived a philosopher known only as Arcturus M. He was neither young nor old in any meaningful sense, for he had ceased to regard time as a sequence and instead treated it as a malignant illusion, a poorly constructed narrative imposed upon consciousness. Arcturus devoted his life to the proposition that mortality was not an inevitability, but a misinterpretation. “To die,” he would write in his private codices, “is merely to accept the grammatical authority of finitude. But grammar, like all human constructs, may be unlearned.” His contemporaries dismissed him as an elegant madman. Yet

Dead red rose, I hold cold thorns bite into my skin— still I don’t let go. Dead red rose, I cry petals fall like broken days— none of them come back. Dead red rose, I stand wind keeps counting what is lost— I keep counting too. Dead red rose, gone slow heartbeats echo in the dust— love learns how to stop.