The Final Paragraph

 Is too long for an epitaph.

Back a few years I wrote the first of what would become a few books.

The first one I called Screen Saver.

I have always thought that the last paragraph was pretty good.

It took a startling number of pages to get there, though.

Here is is.

"And then everything folds backwards upon itself.  The chestnut blossoms have become recycle days and recycle days have become mountain ash berries.  The time of a clock that appears from nowhere is at hyper speed even as it stands still, even as its hands pass one another intermittently backwards, even as it blurs, even as it disappears. A sense of mortality blends with the realization of boundaries. The dream is not a dream.  The dream is reality.  And reality is a dream.  And the boundaries fade and opportunities lost and achievements unattained loom and overwhelm. Whatever it had been that I had ever thought that I might be or might have been is becoming a neatly wrapped package; it is becoming a sleekly designed capsule.  And then some infinite unseen and unseeable facility or force compresses it all – the hopes, the dreams, the illusions, the achievements, the misses and near misses, the loves, the hates, the intentions good and the attentions bad - into an expendable portion and inserts it into infinity."