[R] Birth/Rebirth

This is a movie about a new kind of undead. A question of whether or not you're truly alive if you are a shell of your former self, if you're only kept alive by the monthly tissue donations of a mad scientist. Of how much one is willing to lose to keep a heart beating. The answer, to the final question, is blood. It's your conscience. One could argue, it's your life. In the effort to preserve what is destined to be lost, oftentimes we toss aside what makes us truly alive. Experiences, connections, romance. Everything revolves around one idea, one purpose, one motivation, one heartbreak, one heartbeat, one experiment, one project, one lie. We ignore the inevitable, that nothing beautiful lasts forever, that heartbreak stays with us until we die, and that everything must die. You, me, this website, the stars in the sky, the trees across the street, the woman loading groceries into her car to take home to her family, the passerby on the street you made eye contact with, that woman's family, the planet. We're all going to die, out of sync with each other. We're going to feel our hearts rend apart with each loss, the absence of the familiars. But if we avoid the heartache, if we fight to preserve the totality of our experiences as people, we limit ourselves to being whoever we were at the start of the preservation. We enslave ourselves to our memories, we allow our past to become a parasite which slowly strips us of the joy of everything we haven't lived to see yet.

At night when I lie awake, thinking of all of the people who've slipped through the cracks in my fingers, I'll remember Celia's manic smile as she greeted her twice undead child. And I'll remember how, like a dog trying to dig into a hardwood floor, I'd drive myself insane trying to accomplish the impossible.

You're beautiful.

- Z