Water

I was sleeping a moment before. I am not sleeping right now. Between these moments...

A while back, not all that long ago, I crushed a girl's life. Utterly, out of the blue, I pulled her out of what to her had been, suspiciously but substantially her life. I took that suspicious substance of what she deemed, of what to her had seemed her life and crumpled it up. I pulled it right out, like you'd tear a scene out of a pull-out book for kids, crumpled it up and crushed it like a wet paper noodle, underfoot. It's gone, all suspicions checked out, rounded out, confirmed. It's gone, and it self-evidently never was a life in the first place, to any degree, in any substantial sense, not at all. Excepting the part where it actually had been her life, lived as such, for however long, it never has been nor could ever had been a life. Never could have been. Never. A sleep, perhaps, slept, a moment before. Not anymore, after a certain point. Gone, past a certain moment.

Sleep is a lot like youth. There's nothing to regret more than, besides, or beyond

She said, "Daddy, you're so pretty. You got eyelashes just like a bitch's. Phyllis took Chris to visit that sucker in the shit-house. Daddy, can I kiss my candy?

No more ; yet in the moment it's never perceived ; and afterwards it's gone. Forever gone.

Nothing at all, as it may seem, traded for what you want, whatever it is that you want ; that nothing in time inescapably rounding itself, growing into massive, obliteratingly all-encompassing everythingness while the whatever it was you wanted shrinking, insubstantially, unesteemably, evaporating quietly, invisibly and by itself, like naphtalene. There was a ball of it there, you recall clearly ; now it is gone. No one took it, nobody touched it, where's it gone ?! There's a reason old memories, like the old houses they inhabit, all reek of mothballs. Mothballs long gone, purchased in trade certified on receipts lost long ago.

I barely sleep these days, but with the dawn I stretch, and yawn, and... carry on. To water. The nights are cool, and I'm a fool. Each star's a pool, of water... The dry little scenes rendered in colored bits of paper, readily pulled out of easily yielding pages of well written books readily mix with all the readily abundant water everywhere. They readily crush, then, underfoot, all crumpled up. So many wet paper noodles underfoot. And then, the dawn... and carry on...

Things she had never tried before, things she had pretended she was doing but never truly done before, things she pretended don't exist so as to not do though she'd have done, things of herself and of the world novel to her for no reason at all, in a succession, done and redone. I watch her go, she doesn't notice me, too absorbed in the impossible insanity of novelty. After a long while I speak, and she shudders, and she admits upon reflection : indeed, never before. Striking, impossible, yet true. How could this be ? It is. But all of it is... was... all of it right there, all along ? Indeed.

Everyone ultimately wakes for water. Most, in the bladder ; I wake for water acumulated in my mind, tears in the mind's eye, abundant, readily turned to rain. A rainmaker's sleep, suspicious, dubious, more like pretense than limit, an activity condescended, tolerated, engaged in for fellowship. "Master doesn't sleep, he waits." For water.

One day it shall all wash away, one day it shall all be washed away. By whom ? An old man, an old man just like me. It's said that they forget ; and then the seven-fold river, dark as Night, quiet, memoryless... that's water, water all through, pure water all through. The paper bits, once dry, once colorful, all crumpled underfoot, long gone, long long ago. Whence they go, when they go ? Not like Autumn's dry leaves, gone with a whisp of wind, piled up to be eventually burned, one last huzzah of an aroma, the true and only scent of nostalgy. Maybe just like them, inconsiderable, unconsidered knots of color, now powerless once dolorous color swept away like discarded virtual items on the virtual floors of a computer game. Where's the junk you threw on the floor gone when it's gone ? You wore it once, maybe. You could've worn it, for sure. Gone now, like it never was, floating away on the uneven mists of memory towards the even waters of oblivion. There it'll stay, forever, and not be.

Oracles may well ask of anyone, "what of you, in your life". Sometimes they do. No one can ever answer, for no one may ever answer. Questo non e consentito. Perch'e immorale.