marching toward progress

winter

in dark of winter
lots of stillness required
for death to finish

the last year of my life

We will all die.
You do know that. Don't you?
Every last one of us. Dead, probably within 100 years.
150 years; all new people.
Sure.

We will all die.
Please don't be so cavalier about withholding your I Love You's. It's something you have in infinite supply.

We will all die. It's inevitable. No amount of anything can stop this inexorable event. Nobody is exempt.
And if you live with this ever present in your mind. Then what? What kind of a Life will you create? What choices will you make with this flag raised, full and billowing red over your left shoulder? Who will you keep close? Who will you walk away from? Who will you kiss late into the night, expectations jettisoned, only the soft pillowness of their open lips and how yours can stroke them in fresh new ways in every moment; this your only concern.

We will all die.
I will die.

I will die.


There's a relief in knowing it's something I can't stop from happening.
Not my responsability. Something that just is. On, and then off.

I will die.
Me, no more.

Who will regret not knowing me?
Who will claim they did?
Who will find my passing of absolutely no consequence?
Who will find it catastrophic?

Will the Sense of my Life finally become apparent?
A run-on sentance finally punctuated with a period.

This is the last year of my Life. I don't know how long it will last. What is Beauty in this case? What's imperative to accomplish? What, finally, can be seen for what it really is; irrelevant?
And what in this The Last Year of My Life also needs to be capitalized?



And more...
I am finally satisfied that I am living an interesting life, a life I will be happy to have lived when viewed through my final breath. I wish to have the courage and energy to keep it up. To choose the path that leads through night to sunrise. To say "Yes". To know the difference between Fear and Discernment. That Envy is a nasty indicator of Desire. That Loving, like Forgiving, is a choice to be made a million times a day. To understand that Quiet is not Depression. To have eyes for the Beauty in the Grotesque. To know all people as Friend, met and unmet. To really understand that I live on a Planet not in a country. To have Compassion when I don't. When you don't.


Happy Christmas, Love.

silent breakfast

my friend made me breakfast.
we didn't know each other very well.
we'd worked together for a number of months.
he was having a silent day.
so did I.

roof

I didn't think about guns in pockets once today.

new fear

I was in a parking garage. I'd fallen down stairs and hurt my leg the previous night and so was not my usual vibrant self; a little fragile. It was a slow walk from my car to the elevator.

A man came out of a door at the end of the garage, balding, stocky. He was walking with purpose toward me, his hand in his pocket. The possibility that he may have been concealing a gun become very real. It's gurgled up more than once today.

I felt Fear.

Now I know what small women feel.

First time. Last time.

A young man was killed. Shot dead in the middle of the night. A woman watches tv. A bullet, stray, through her living room window, through her head. An abandoned baby, so sweet, and now adopted. Another man left to die in a cul de sac.
Just news stories.



I've been doing publicity on a feature film, a documentary about food. My friend who I'd been in Czech with, came to opening night. Connections are amazing; his best friend was also working on the film. And so he shows up (he, who I've had a crush on since the first night we drank under the stars in the courtyard of an impossibly picturesque little Eastern European town...it must have been the stars). He sits beside me. Be brings his friend. Who sits on my other side. Who's, whatever. Blond, a little bit obnoxious. But well enough.



The news. Another shooting. A young artist. In his prime. Not even. His prime is still on the horizon, just barely glimpsed. His future is golden. Dead, point blank in the early morning hours. Shot from behind as he ran, carefree down a city street. Blonde, a little bit obnoxious.

I stare at his face, pixilated on countless newspapers. Staring out from boxes, left on bus seats, mopping up coffee spills in the local restaurant. I'm drawn to it. Such promise. A painter about to leave for Paris. 23. I figure my attraction is because he's probably from my community. Openings, here and there. I've probably seen him.



It's breakfast on this day and I decide to treat myself. Sometimes the thing you want to do is the exact thing you should. My friend from Czech is there with others. He explains to me that the face staring out from all the papers, the new poster boy for national gun control, is his friend. His best friend. He was in the audience at the opening night of the movie.


It's only as I drive away from the restaurant that I realize that he was the blonde from the movie theatre, who sat beside me, I feel a little bit nauseous. Not well at all.

If only.
I join in the chorus murmured throughout the city.
If only.
What? What's mine? We had so little time together.
If only we had gone out for beer after the movie, everything would have shifted, maybe, just enough for that bullet to have missed by a hair. A blond hair.
If only.
His mother had hugged him just a second longer.
If only he'd choked on the sushi he'd eaten or gotten mild food poisoning and had to go home early that night.
If only he'd fallen in love with me, I'd be holding him safe in my arms in bed.
Or I'd be dead.


I didn't pay much attention to him that night. Our first and last meeting, hours from his final moments. If only I had. Who's to know. It may have been just enough.

My friend who I was in Czech with, was there that night. He's far more shattered than he lets on. And next time he sits beside me I'm going to relish him. His whole blond self. A little obnoxious. But well.