I'll write about Babylon instead of dreamless empires still dividing the land. I'll write of hanging gardens that captivated each new invading army. I'll write of things that never happened to me. History (in its grand allure) will cover the typographical landscape of my mind and I will learn to suffer as an historian: with a faint scholarly smirk of disdain for the present.

It is with this understanding that I can see myself equally as likely in a life past to vigorously attempt to protect the great library of Alexandria as to be one of those who rushed in to destroy it. The acts are equivalent, but I would hate myself now if I were to discover that it was I who brazenly destroyed these records of the past in the heat of the moment.

What I would have failed to have realized then is that the system of meaning would be radically changed thanks to new media. I would have failed to understand that the abstraction of metaphorical thinking related to the referent and the value of its meaning would be overtaken with a vast skein that covers the entire terrain. Each of us is a survivor in a life raft occasionally eyeing others baring the sea. At certain points the currents intersect and at those strange moments the abstractions become real. Apollo and Dionysus begin to sing and paint a whirlwind of a song. The sun cascading over the water destroys every referent with blindness. In this ecstasy of the moment we share Oedipus's fate and in full agreement bellow out that "all is right with the world."

We know what Oedipus saw once he plucked his eyes from his face, but we rarely name it. At times I think about that girl that fell down a pipe and it took days to pull her out. Baby Jessica is a full-grown woman with kids now. No one can understand this because she will always be Baby Jessica. She will always be that girl in the deep, dark hole that people so desperately tried to save. Now she has a scar on her forehead and she ought to be grateful for that; most of us aren't so lucky. Most of us look completely intact, but when we don't our scars are usually aren't telling the truth either.

I have different stories to tell, and as such I realize that truth. They are stories regardless of everything. This is how I became my own historian and why right now I choose to write of Babylon and hanging gardens. I can close my eyes and see myself there: perched between the Tigress and Euphrates rivers in the heart of civilization feeling at that moment as if I were in the center of the universe. The flicker of awareness that this location will be a site of reoccurring violence and intrigue will contaminate the back of my mind just enough to want to enjoy the moment even this much more. This breath will be lost in its own time.