At the end of the line...

The best you can do is forgive...

He keeps imagining the worst possible outcomes, so he's ready if they ever come. But what if the things life has in store, he can't even begin to phantom? He keeps asking questions of the universe, but it has gone silent. Does that mean he's been abandoned or is being taught to rely more on himself? To see luck, where he previously saw failure? To uncover courage where fear thrives, and nurture understanding even where chaos consumes all?

If anything, this year has been about letting go. Letting go of my ego. Of the notion that nothing bad can ever happen to me, and that I am somehow exempt from the trials of life. Letting go of my belief that my willpower alone is enough to control the outcomes of my endeavors. Letting go of my need to resolve things, to get answers where there are none, to be seen as the mediator, as the savior. Bad, terrible things are going to keep happening, and I need to build myself up in order to withstand them. To be a reliable partner, brother and son. This year I have been tested and failed at almost every turn. Tried and stumbled, took the wrong path, cried when I should have been strong and pointed fingers, when I should have given grace. So many things I could have done differently, so many things I now have the opportunity to change.

It's a long goodbye on the other side...

Another glimpse of what could've been,

another dream, 

another way that it nevеr was.

Falling back in the wilderness,

waking up, rubbing salt in thе cut.

Every breath is a break in the riptide...

Last one to know...

In a universe in which past, present, and future came into existence all at once, complete from beginning to end, with all possible outcomes of every life woven through the tapestry, there is no chance, only choice. And in this sown together life, good luck is more dangerous than anything. Bad luck teaches valuable lessons about patience, timing, and the need to be prepared for the worst; good luck deludes you into the opposite lesson, making you think your brilliance will carry you through. Your fortune will inevitably turn, and when it does you will be completely unprepared.

This life isn't forever...

I'm on the edge. I'm off the edge. I'm over the edge and falling into hell on the other side. I'm down in the cracks of the sidewalks. In the dirt and in the blood, and the ants are looking up. I'm in the trenches and I can't get out. No matter how hard I try to maintain my calm and collected persona, I know it is all a ruse. All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and hide. Hide from the world. Hide from my memories. Enter a shell and never leave. But mine would always be a broken shell, with all her cracks and holes exposed for the world to see. The veneer I had carefully painted to protect and hold myself together was peeling away.

Pull me out of the waves...

When push comes to shove...

It's all right riding around in the breeze,

it's all right if you live the life you please,

it's all right doing the best you can,

well, it's all right as long as you lend a hand.

You're glowing in the dark...

It is a dangerous thing with brothers, to think that you could be as strong as them, or as wise as them, or as good as them. To believe that you could have been the same person, if only you hadn’t gone a different way. To think that your parents raised you the same, and that your genes combined the same, and that the rest of what has happened in all your triumph ... or failure.

He wishes that he had some guarantees about the afterlife. He wishes he were absolutely certain that his grandparents are now together in some tranquil and restful place, sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too-short stint on this Earth allowed. He wishes he knew that they were offering enough comfort to one another to allow them both not to remember their distressing, even excruciating, last hours and days. Perhaps in this very moment they are peacefully making their way down the zigzag trail that joins the villages to the rest of the world below. And in his imagining, whenever they lose track of one another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hills. Where are you? Right here, my love. Right here.

Oh boy, I think I'm in trouble now...

For so long I thought I've been playing the last act of this nightmare of a year. With my life in turmoil for so long, it just seems impossible to avoid the setup of a shattering countdown when it will all be over and the tide will once again turn in my favor. So I give an insistent appeal for crucial answers, but I only receive evasive responses or killing silence from the universe. But the banks of my patience are bursting, an intractable cataclysm disturbs my interior world. Yet, this disruption might allow me to restore my emotional power by cleansing the oppressive environment and purifying the air that I breathe. Maybe I can still get out of this alive. 

They stare because they know...

All normal expectations went by the board and my daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that I simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass. That if there was only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since I could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remained unfathomable and inconceivable. There was nothing I could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible. 

How it was, it will never be again...

The cost of your mind...

But the sun's going to go ahead,

and tag right up,

and we don't understand,

what we're standing on,

and we sure come in blind,

with our timing. 

So I've culled what I can't tame,

I have taken all that I can take,

It got bad enough.

You couldn't write this...

I'll put my guard down for you...

He imagines giving up. No more peering through windows, mourning the loss of a life that could never again be his. No more hopeless desire. No more uncertain future. No more terror. Then he wakes up.

Now, it felt like every day a new oozing pustule of emotion came glopping out. One day it was a goopy mass of abandonment issues. Then there was the gelatinous muck of hyper-independence weighing down my proverbial galoshes. The steaming, writhing mass that was my identity crisis was particularly pungent some days. It had come to my attention the hard way that for years my coping mechanism had been to numb myself; turn my emotions off completely. Any that snuck through were instantly squashed under humor, deflection, or anger. A perfect plan, until that damn straw had hit the camel's stupid back.

Heart in the casket...

He is always a different man; a reinterpretation of the man he was yesterday, and the day before, and all the days he has lived. The past is gone, was always gone; it does not exist, except in memory, and what is memory but thought, a copy of perception, no less but no more replete with truth than any passing whim, fancy, or other agitation of the mind. And if it is actions, words, thoughts that define an individual, those definitions alter like the weather - if continuity and pattern are often discernible, so are chaos and sudden change. He is changing again.