Writing is the only thing I’ve ever done with persistence, except for being married.

He smiled at me, and it was not the worried, nervous smile from before, but a smile that meant he was pleased. And I don’t remember him ever smiling at me that way again.

And I knew that was not a bad thing at all, not for anyone, in any life.

Possibly this is one more version of “disappearing into your life”, the way career telephone company bigwigs, overdutiful parents and owners of wholesale lumber companies are said to do and never know it. You simply reach a point at which everything looks the same but nothing matters much. There’s no evidence you’re dead, but you act that way.

It’s odd how a piece of ground can hold so little of its meaning; though that’s lucky, since for it to do so would make places sacred but impenetrable, whereas they’re otherwise neither.

You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.

I believe in what you see being most of what there is, as I’ve taught my students, and that life’s passed along to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that’s the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent.

Somehow, and for no apparent reason, your decisions got tipped over and you lost your hold. And one day you woke up and you found yourself in the very situation you said you would never ever be in, and you did not know what was most important to you anymore. And after that, it was all over. And I did not want that to happen to me did not, in fact, think it ever would.

My always needn’t be forever. I’m ready for the plunge, nervy as a cliff-diver. Though if down the line things go rotten we can both climb the cliffs again. Life is long.

A lot of things seem one way but are another. And how a thing seems is often just the game we play to save ourselves from great, panicking pain.