2:38 a.m. Another segment of time has filled our little brains with experiences and memories. We called that a day.

Another young person has left the planet. Another journaler has framed her site in black, separating the segment called today from all those past times we can't really appreciate, even when we hold them, except in reflection.

I've wondered a few things about death.

It seems that we human beings are very comfortable with a lot of the less-than-savory demands that fill the rule book we're handed at birth. We gulp air without thinking, even though we've only known water.

We have to consume minerals, proteins, sugars ... and so we get hungry. Look askance at the boar, the cheetah, the chicken -- chase it across the savanna, if necessary. We'll eat runny eggs from the warm bellies of bird or fish, drink milky discharges from strange pink hanging teats.

Nobody has to twist your arm to have sex, either. Do you remember, even dimly, the first time you heard about the mechanics? And do you remember your revulsion? Your own mother and father must have done it!

I remember the slutty 6-year-old who told me that particularly difficult-to-swallow tidbit at around 4:30 p.m. on a September afternoon. I had to get home, but I'd suddenly lost my way. The world seemed tilted and flattened and my mother was keeping some fried chicken warm on the stove for dinner.

I had no appetite -- I could barely drag my glance up from the red-flowered oilcloth to look at the disgusting people who sat at the table with me. The chicken skin had gotten all wrinkled and loose on the bone and I was going to get a beating if I didn't eat it.

My point is that nature seems to provide for her creatures by giving us the appetites and the instincts to do what is necessary to survive. When it's time for a baby to be born, the mother's muscles and bones and heart and soul contract and expand and make way for the new life. The little you who got pregnant just goes along, like an ant on a beach ball, for the ride. The real pain comes from holding her hand and watching someone else do it.

We're all just going along for the ride, after all. There's not a life form on this earth who won't transform. Each time we sigh, someone else takes a breath. At the end of each of our individual roads, there is a sheer drop, off a billion-mile-high cliff.

So, why the fear? Did I say fear? How about absolute total, Stephen King-like terror. Debilitating all consuming panic and dread at the very thought? Is this any way to react to something so inevitable? Have you ever stopped to wonder about that?

Well -- no need. I have. I mean, why would nature make us so naturally afraid of something we absolutely must and most certainly will be experiencing? Isn't that a huge waste of adrenaline? A needless churning of stomach acids; a fruitless splurge of precious tears?

Well, what if our dose of quaking and quivering is designed precisely to keep us alive as long as possible? To keep our hands away from Cocteau's mirror?

What if dying is an experience so divine, so transcendent and transporting, so ... wonderful ... that, if word got out, we'd all be in a headlong rush to get there, hurling ourselves like lemmings into the nearest oncoming lane?

Imagine.

It makes a certain sense, if you think about it.