Her Permitted Say

A clear blue sky: a new day.

This time not on anyone else's behalf: this one I am making for myself, "of hammered gold and gold enameling,.." 

I am weak, but not so weak as I was, and there is still time, a little bit of time.

The first one, appropriately enough, is the Arabian Nights: The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night. Foolish and embarrassing stuff, but you enter by the door that opens to you. And there is that moment, that moment of surfacing from one tale to find yourself in the framing tale, and the vertigo of half-remembering that there's a frame above this one too, which hints of a frame still larger and more unknown.

Every night we wake from sleep: there's always the hope, or the fear, that someday we'll wake from waking, and recover the thread of the previous tale, the one of which this life's tale was just an explanatory aside. 

And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.