you keep using that word...

i keep using the word escape.

escape from what?

you can't ever escape from this very minute. it holds you all wrapped up and very captive.

but very free.

i wrote a silly little essay about that idea once. about my first crummy part-time job and the price they bought me for. seven dollars an hour to stand around wishing you were somewhere else.

and since then i have come to the conclusion that you must sell your soul to somebody in the end. keeping it is not an option. you can't escape.

none of us can. life is consequences. x + y = purple. sometimes they don't make sense. sometimes they make so much sense it kills you.

escape to where?

just more moments just like this one. just more thinking inside my own skin. my own socks. drawing lines that don't go anywhere.

there is a lot of elsewhere. but once you get there it will just be another here and now. horizons are unreachable things.

so the big question is why bother, right? what difference does it make?

well i never liked subtraction much, but change is always loss and loss is so often pain. even though i'm happily watching the weeks dwindle this time... this well-anticipated horizon too will recede into a further, darker future.

i just hope i can take some light with me. some matches to strike on more questions, some kindling to burn into answers.

i used to say the price of my soul was a quart or so of belgian chocolate ice cream.

it's gone way up since then. staggeringly.

the next question, the one hanging on the very end of the furthest horizon i can see, is escape with whom?

and beyond that there's not even darkness. it's all simply inconceivable.