Fire shy and cold alone...

Behind these tired eyes...

I am now 27 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. I can still remember how I once gazed into the future, thinking that it's still so far away, yet here I am now, fully living it. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. 

Sometimes losing, sometimes shooting...

For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering under the cold wind. For a split second, by screwing up his eyes, he managed to read the writing, but it vanished with lightning speed and he could not be sure. It seemed to go like this: there's no reason to be afraid.