Worn Almost Away

Of the great apes, we are the only ones that are much good at swimming.

---

The mosquito people must be feeling ill-used this year: it went from too cold for them to too hot for them in about 36 hours. They've worked off their resentment by biting me more times in the last couple days than they did all of last year.

---

Such a beautiful fresh morning. Never been able to understand sleeping through the most beautiful part of the day. Though I'm glad most people want to: it means I can be quietly alone with the sunrise. The light lies on the world like new-fallen snow, and I don't really want it criss-crossed with tracks, yet.

---

I don't know what I've become. Not what I intended, but not what I feared, either. So far from where I started. The only thing I still have, that I started with, is my sense of how beautiful it all is.

Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to endless night.

It's not that I'm never sad, or that I don't miss you. But I'm like a swimmer being pulled into the current of delight. It runs faster and stronger all the time. And why I'm being pulled into this one, instead of the dark one, I have no idea. I've done some things wrong and some right, like everyone else. And willy nilly, I think of death as being completely swept away in that delight. I don't mean I think of it, I don't think of it at all, in the ordinary sense. I'm aware of it like a stage actor's aware of the audience, or a hiker's aware of the sound of a river. Behind everything, holding it up – the real reason for all this – there, you see? The minute you start talking about it you find yourself saying stupid things, false things. Automatic phrases, things you want to be true but you know aren't, quite.

---

And you want to give it to people. It seems so clear and direct. Here, have my joy, what could I possibly do with so much? I'm being washed over with bright oceans of it. And yet I can't do it. I can hold someone in my arms, willing the delight into them, and they can be right there in the dark, in the emptiness, feeling nothing but despair, as thoroughly in the dark as I am in the light. I don't understand how that can be.

---

Rest a while. I am tired: I am exhausted, actually. I feel like a shell worn almost away: translucent, beautiful, fragile.

---

Wishing I could set things right before I go.