Ed was running out of extremities. Dropping his fingerless, cellophane-wrapped hand into a cardboard box to ship to Charlene in Alaska meant he had to start considering a surgical procession up his left arm or perhaps elements of his head. Was a wrist alone sufficient to be considered a proper part of him? Or was it so lacking in utility that it could be nothing more than something the recipient would throw in the trash, like a three-day old leftover burger? Toes, feet, calves, knees, and chunks of his lower thighs were no longer options: Those had already been shipped to Ellen, Alia, Jen, Anaya, Lizzy, Kris, Paula, and so many others, all to great effect and confessions of affection that distributed his self in an increasingly wide range to the point that today, when the sun reached through the windows of his New York apartment to tell him the morning had begun, he was joyously and sadly and nothingly not-unsure or not-sure that the star-generated heat and non-darkness was him or not him, his skin no longer a shell but a vein in a larger organism, a bridge so short as to be an embrace.
Develop meditation on the perception of impermanence for the conceit 'I am' will be abandoned.