Poem in my Wallet

When I was 14 or 15, I remember waiting in an empty doctor's office to be seen by my doctor. The waiting room reading consisted of medical journals and very old copies of The New Yorker. I sat, trying not to shiver in the cold office, and flipped through an old copy of The New Yorker when I stumbled upon a poem whose beauty took my breath away. I was moved to do something I had never done before--I tore the poem carefully out of the magazine, folded it neatly, and tucked it inside my wallet. I have changed wallets multiple times over the years since I found this poem, and yet it always is moved to the new wallet. This poem is always with me, and has been with me for over 14 years.

So without any further ado, here is it.

To Whoever Is Reading Me

You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you,
those powers that preordain your destiny,
the certainty of dust? Is not your time
as irreversible as that same river
where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
which you will not read--on it, already written,
the date, the city, the epitaph.
Other men, too, are only dreams of time,
not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;
the universe is, like you, a Proteus.
Dark, you will enter the darkness that expects you,
doomed to the limits of your travelled time.
Know that in some sense you are already dead.

-Jorge Luis Borges

(translated from the Spanish, by Alastair Reid)