Smiling when I die...

Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really make anything neater. It just masks what is below. It's only when you really dig down deep, go underground, that you can see who you really are.

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All his life he had been looking for something, and everywhere he turned someone tried to tell him what he was. He accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. He was naïve. He was looking for himself and asking everyone except himself questions which he, and only he, could answer. It took him a long time and much painful boomeranging of his expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That he is nobody but himself.