Tuesday 30 August 2005

Pic of the day: "Event horizon" is the sphere around a black hole, beyond which even light cannot escape. We can never know what happens on the other side.

Personal event horizon

Since this spring, my body has improved in small but noticeable ways. I have lost ten pounds of fat, and come within striking distance of my ideal weight. I look probably nearly as athletic as I ever will, although in all fairness that doesn't say much... I would go straight from flabby to scrawny in less forgiving eyes than my own. But strangely, also the sores on my legs have healed, those who were still open after one and two years respectively. The rashes that covered patches of my lower body have receded or disappeared outright, depending on their nature, and the hairless patches on my calves are no longer shiny bald. It is as if my body has reconsidered its decision to decompose with me inside. I appreciate that.

Back then, I thought my fascination with my pulse clock and jogging shoes was just another 14-day fad. I have lots of those. But instead it has remained a lifestyle through the spring and summer, and I have no idea when it will end. I may need new shoes, admittedly. They don't feel quite as good as they did, and I wonder if the occasional pain in my knees could have something to do with them. But that's not what I meant to say today.

The strange thing is that none of this has changed the eerie sense of foreboding. For years I have felt this thing waiting in the future, and for a while now I have thought this year. This year I have pinpointed it to the fall. Now it seems so close that I may almost touch it. A personal event horizon.

***

In truth none of us knows what will happen tomorrow, or even five minutes from now. So our personal "event horizon" is always just in front of our nose. But we choose to live each day as if it is not the next. Or perhaps we just do it by default without thinking about it.

Certainly I have renounced any pretense to psionics or magic many years ago. So there is no reason why I should "know" that my current lifestyle will end Really Soon Now. Unless it is something happening inside me, something I am able to feel but not to measure logically. It could be something of the body or of the mind.

Or it could be just a figment of my imagination. Surely if I read this a year from now and my life then is just like now, then I know that it was just a weird feeling, a malfunction of my brain's software.