A Thought Regarding Epitaphs/Tombstones...

There's a certain haecceity imbued in the cave paintings of our anonymous ancestors that tombstones can never rival. The act of pressing one's palm against a secluded stone, with a fire burning in the depths to illuminate those breath-blown pigments that leave an empty outline of one's feeling form, before it's pulled away and left unseen for some timeless eternity thereafter... The life-essence and symbolic synechdoche of such an act...

When Picasso looked at such visions and said, "we've invented nothing", I think he understood something about what cannot be simply seen or said about the essence of truly beholding something that so aptly encapsulates what it is to live and die as humans.

If I can leave behind any semblance of that for anyone left to behold a world that lives on in their eyes, as a fire still burns somewhere in the surrounding darkness, and hands still press against the earth to feel what it is to be here, and breath can still be used to leave the impressions of what will also be left as something both lost and yet left dreaming against the void of time eternal... If I can do that through any act, I will have truly lived. And death will have claimed no victory over the life that's left behind. And there will be no need for any stone to frame my fugue or any words left tethered to my untold tales, as the essence of all I ever aspired will whisper on quite well without me.