Three images come to mind, reading “Terminal” unprompted.
Versatile word! But, despite its range, it’ll always be accompanied by a morose curtain drawn. Never to stand on its own. Either lifelessly recorded in an instructional beginner’s tech post or taken as a meager stake in the sand, “you shall not cross” scratched in. Though the latter sublates the former, as any forray into tech leaves one either vacated or supercharged, but never the lukewarm before, and thus a distinct past, which may be a trivial comment, but nevertheless is the gestalt of what I’m “pointing” out.
For with my days I love to imagine each moment destroyed and each moment reborn, no matter how the sequence plays otherwise. As you walk, each split-second you are and are no longer, just to be once more. Each step a separate world. Why bring this up?
A central wonder summons with the above treated as Truth. One must wonder how similar do the chained worlds of moments need to be?
Well, not very similar necessarily. You can make the next instantiated world widely different, why not? With each step, if a new man is born, derived from the previous for efficiency and within reason, the new man to be doesn’t necessarily need to hold all its derivatives. Beyond continuing some logical constraints like where you’re walking (though up for debate), anything else is game.
If there was a difficulty, then it may be found in the that moroseness “Terminal” lugs around. For if the above is true, that each moment is created and destroyed, then as things stand rarely does one care of the permanence in each moment lost.
Fortunately the feeling of loss it only is noticable when the change is too much. Despite how much one may want the change coming! I suppose it’s the strung heart waiting to be let-go, the faint beat of that “you” which now must be sacrificed. It must.
It’s Terminal.
It’s Goodbye.
It’s Over.
It’s Ending.
It’s Forever.
You’ve said goodbye to versions of yourself, however the song of yourself goes. Whether it’s a great bump or an age bump into a location transfer, it all comes as the same.
No matter how beautiful the other side is! The next destination! It deeply unsettles (at least me), despite knowing that a Terminal is soon approaching. Always. Always approaching.
I’m soon turning into something else entirely, for I’ve reached the end of what I currently am.
Whether fortunate or not, without Terminals you aren’t flipping chapters. Without Terminals you aren’t looking forwards.
Despite the weight waiting, the foreboding permanence glossed in, one will confront their Terminals soon enough.
Maybe when you confront enough of them you really do just switch between different worlds as effortlessly as a walk. (I don’t expect this to make much sense.)
The point is this: right now we can be reborn into entirely different beings. Why don’t we?
I would say it’s because of that Terminal word, the bittersweets in endings. Having to kill who you currently are.
But writing this out makes me realize something essential:
If you got here once, can’t you get here again?
If that’s the case, why not sacrifice everything you are, as you can come back again? There’s nothing to fear.
The word Terminal haunts… but the word Terminal doesn’t seem to exist in our eternity together.