The Boy Who Always Was

He had always been.

His memory, stretching like iron rails of a locomotive toward the heat-hazed horizon, was interminable.

He had always been, at the beginning of all things, gazing into the breadth of eternity.

Now in the present he struggled for a singular memory at the instant of his becoming, a memory he could quarantine and isolate from all others. A memory that marked the first moment. But always as he reached back through the recesses of his mind to recall his genesis each memory revealed to him its ancestor.

When had he come to be? When had the first breath been drawn?

Sadness flooded him, his eyes filling with tears.

Time let its linear robes fall away as past and future melded into one singular space, one moment that had never begun and would never end.

A crawling inescapable terror rose in him, seating itself atop his shoulders, unshakeable and resolute.

He would always be…