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the last departure of the long-suffering day and other curiosities.
There came a time when he no longer parceled out his days, when the warmth of the sun was in his bones and it felt right once more to just exist for a while in the long green summertime. It was perhaps the first time in his life he could just sort of hang suspended, like a bag of tea plunged into boiling water, coloring everything around him. One evening he left his friend behind on the dock at the lake and walked, hands in pockets, up the gravel road. The light cut through the canopy of trees in strange ways and he felt like he was in the land of dreams. He wondered if some moments were beautiful enough to kill you where you stood, if a momentary pleasure could be so great that you would rather go on to the dirt rather than endure another aching hour without it.
Maybe you could call this happiness. You could call it a lot of things. For his part, he had no idea what to call it. All he knew was that he no longer woke up to nothingness, to mere existence. It seemed real and good enough to walk the world like a ghost freed from his earthly pressures, free from the ashen foreheads and water-stained cheeks that mark human life- free to hold something in his hand and simply consider it for what it was, rather than for what it could do for him.
He kept waiting for the bottom to drop out, but it never did. The hammer had always fallen before, but now he searched the skies for glimpses of iron to no avail. He who had always felt so heavy-laden now was light as a falling leaf- and he felt clearly the rhythm of the stream that carried him along to wherever he was going. His body and soul felt older with each passing day, but his heart was like something newborn, like an elemental stirring of a brand new age- something born in both water and fire, ready to devour every beautiful thing the world had to offer.
