Slowly, my past fades. The nights in Genoa when I walked along the sea, and my imagination was devoted to naive dreams of genius; songs full of future glory and beauty and adventure, which only a mind at seventeen is foolish and arrogant enough to create. Now that the guitar has gone silent, and I have forgotten the tune: only the obscure passions which the music created remain.
The memories of my infancy and childhood in Singapore, have abandoned me. They are but castles of sand which have been erased by the sea, the same sea which has endlessly taken with it the ruins of all eternal civilizations, and heroes, and ordinary men.
My time at university, all those nights spent with a few dear companions; youths who's spirits are bright and passionate, and able to obscure the flames of stars with their desires. Friends, the word itself seems an insult to what we were. We shared sentiments and thoughts like those of more than-brothers. The nights were filled with laughter and melancholy; sculpted by hard and steady fingers of philosophy and serious discussion; and also the softer furrows on those fingers, full of frivolity and laughter and understanding and humanity. The fingerprints of the sculptor on the clay statue of deity.
Those nights and mornings are real and alive in my mind. Their breath still leaving a fragrance of happiness, and my companions live in my thoughts as if they were all in this quiet room with me. All those nights full of youth and life, those friendships which are worthier to me than all the sublime sights to be found in this world - they too have begun to fade. These same men which I reminisce shall continue to live for many decades, but the youths of those nights, they are gone, and slowly yet surely my memories of them crumble.
In my mind their portraits are still stored, alive as if painted by the veined and wrinkled hands of Parrhasius and Zeuxis. But they shall decay, and the boys I once called my brothers shall become mere vague faces sketched in dust. That is all that shall remain of the tears and the smiles and the divinity which share: dust.