Musings of an old young dwarf

I don't know who I was, or who I will become. I share that with all my kin. Some try to fight it. They cling to memories of memories of dreams and call it their true self. They carry carved stones with words they call their names. Even if they were the letters themselves would have changed meaning and sound across the millennia. Likely as not their precious slabs are as fake as the 'heritage' they claim to be keeping.
I am not one of those dwarves. Like most of my people I am resigned to always live and always die. Every day I live is another day lost to memory. What will I lose today? The last laugh of a lover? A glorious sunset? A terrible mistake? A lesson learned? Every day I am a little more and a little less than I was yesterday.
I wonder sometimes about the ones who made us. Did they know this would happen? Did they care? The firstborn who made the secondborn knew. As did the secondborn who made the lastborn. They knew the memory death. They must have! Yet they made more, before forgetting. I have asked them why, but of course they have forgotten!
Am I going mad? If I do, how long will it last? I have seen it happen to others. They go mad. Raving lunatics. Suntouched fools! Yet return a century later and they forget the madness, and all that came before it. They seem almost relieved yet cannot remember why.
Perhaps madness would be a blessing. To go mad and forget. To be born anew, with nothing from before...
And yet... and yet. Memories are all we are. Even the present moment is a memory, some scholar from up north told me that. I can't remember when or why. He (she?) used fancy words to explain it. Maybe in a previous life I'd have understood them. Yet I took his meaning. By the time our eyes tell the brain what's happened, and the brain's made sense of it - it's already the past. We're just living memory machines, entertained by illusions conjured by fallible brains! Madness, yet how could it be otherwise?
And true death? Sometimes I wonder about it. The humans claim our souls that go to the gods, or to Sol, or to the void, the ancestors, Elysium or a hundred other stories... My people claim we go back to the Creators, but I don't know. They haven't given a shit for ten thousand years! And if they couldn't design a brain which can keep the memories, then I don't trust them to keep my soul!
Ah. Perhaps it is best if it is as the elves claim. That consciousness just ends. That is both scary and comforting. Not a leap of faith I am willing to take today. But one day I might, or the person I will become might. 
For now I will continue as I have (presumably) always done. Living and dying one day at a time.