It is not for us to decide who lives and who dies, who stays and who goes. Why should the pot say to the potter, "why did you make me like this?" I guess I never understood that question, I never understood the rhetoric. One thing I do understand: my mind is twisted now. There is nothing now to do but sit, and wilt, and wait for something to come into me and fix what I cannot undo. Fix this mess I have made myself to be. One solution leads to many problems, so that I may never be undone. What lies in the shadow of the statue?

But I am him. I am him who says "what about me? what about me was so wrong?" And there is One who says "yes, what about you?" And so I am shamed. And I am disgusted with myself. And I take out my knife and drive it deep. And still, "what about you?"

"There is no one righteous,
No, not even one."

You are all right, but only because I want you to be. I just want to sit here and keep crying about it, because then I really feel it. I lost my ability to feel the good and bask in it. So I am numb unless I am tortured. I am lost.

"There are two sides. One is Light, one is Dark."

Stick to the basics. Don't get caught up. Stand strong. Stop picking at the scar just to be sure it's still there. Have some hope. Every man dies, not every man really lives. This too shall pass. Stay focused. Find something to focus on. Breathe. Keep your head out of the clouds, keep your heart off the ground. Just breathe.

I suppose he was right when he told me that we need pain to get where we are going. But I can only suppose. I'm sure I won't know for sure until I get there or until I'm satisfied that I am so far from there that I can never reach there. But for now at least, my suppositions can get me through this night, and probably through the next, and before I know it I will have forgotten all about this night and probably about the next.

We are so fragile. Like a mist we are. I wonder what it feels like to die: to live one moment and not live the next. In that last live moment, what will I think of how I have conducted all the moments leading up to it? I believe in part, and I know in part, that I will look back on this night, and probably on the next, and feel either that I had wasted so much time thinking only of myself or that this night's pain lead me to all the moments connected by time and spirit to the final moment. Even still, it is of little consequence. What will be, will be.

I'll wake up in a fog. In a mist I'll find myself. A gentle wind softens my vision. I will be soaked in calm, steeped in slow breath, drenched in understanding. All this when what will be, has been.

And when I was sick? Where were you then? Where have you been? Where I go to seek you, will you be there? Where will I go to seek you out? The mountain? The valley? When I am there, where will you be? In me? In the leaves or the sky or the grass? In the heights? In the depths?

I guess if the past is a dead man, I'll always be performing CPR on him. It's gotten pretty disgusting lately, what with the rotting and decay, but I cannot let him go. Sure, sometimes I give up, stand up and take some steps away, but I seem to end up kneeling again aside the bloated carcass.

Even in my steps away he is what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking that no matter what the truth really is I will forever be deceived by myself and better off for it. Even if I can't run from my deficiencies I can at least hide. Perhaps they will catch me eventually, and so be it. But for now I will convince myself of the right things in just the right places.

I can't take a compliment. If it would help you understand I'd do it. But it won't, nothing ever will, so I don't try. It's not that I don't believe what you say, it's just I believe you to be mistaken. Everyone is wrong. Everyone's wrong about what matters and that's all that matters. I'll never really be the type of man I am. I am not anyone's type. Anyone is my type, and around and around and around. But it's not like I try. It's not like I try to be cryptic. It just is. I just am.

I've gotten pretty disgusting lately, what with the rotting and decay. Just wait until I mean it.

Do you believe in me?

The earth is shifting, even if I cannot feel it. There is a glacier moving through my life. It is scraping all the stone off the top, crushing and tumbling and depositing all the substance of me in places I don't think it belongs. But I have no say in the result, I can no more stop it than I can melt it.

When I look back on my life what will I dwell on? All the romantic things I remember with disdain. Not because of what it meant to feel them, but what it feels like to only remember. It's not the romantic things that eat at me, but the remembering. We only remember what we no longer have.

Can you prove a desire? I think we can desire things, but we can never demonstrate our desire. You can hold hands, but it might just be to stay in place. You can hold her, but it might just be to keep warm. It all starts where it ends.