Rain in the Morning

The lash doesn't just describe a beautiful curve: it does come to the end of itself, and it does crack.

No one promised us soft mornings with a white sky and a gentle rain. We just thought that because it happened when we were children, it would always happen. What else could we think? But when I became a man, childish things were taken away from me. Rain in the morning was only one of them.

But look: there is no time for chasing vanishments. We have real work to do, and real enemies to outwit.

Back then, I could hear a hectic music, sometimes: the skirl of pipe and tabor. Back then my heart would lift, even if the battles I imagined were the mock-battles staged by our masters, and not the real fights on our own behalf, which I would only understand late, late in my life, when my strength was already dwindling, and my teeth were broken and rotting from so much nibbling on lies. My heart would still lift, and it lifts now. 

They still go in terror of us. They have won every contest, and they clutch every prize, and still we give them the horrors. It's not much to work with, is it? But it's not nothing.

Rain in the morning. Just once, before I die. 

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There is no enemy. There is no battle. And there will be rain in the morning, many times. The sky is altered but it's still the sky. And death is granted eventually to every one of us. So take comfort, you silly overwrought boy. Leave this posturing and really think. Really think.

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One tiny fragile thing at a time.

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It is possible to turn, turn in that very slight and graceful way, so that you're presented edgeways to the world, and infinitely narrow, so that for practical purposes you disappear. Then you step sideways, along that plane: and you're gone. Not in this world anymore. Then you have a little time to think. You can still hear the footsteps of busy, anxious, unseen people, but they can't see you or even imagine you. Have you forgotten this? I think you have. That's one of the real problems.