To:

I'm thinking of you as much as each form of existence is possessed by its own corresponding field of memories,
The summation of those recollections cannot errase the living out of a thousand lifetimes.
Yet these fields of habit paradoxically are continuously reformed...
Reinforced by the form they themselves create.
There are painful voids in all our hearts, My heart.
But as Nature's favorite child,
I'll take her gift and bathe in the light amongst all this coldness...
And as for those subtlety placed dreams,
That seem transparent and transposed on a waking mind;
They are hidden tight and away from conscious thoughts,
But none the less very real.

Despite trying hard to dispense with any semblance of routine, each morning brings that familiar but ineffable feeling that something awaits completion. This thing is most readily apparent in the utter stillness of a land blanketed beneath many feet of snow – the new snow, bright and radiant in the cold sun, gives the impression of an almost halcyon earth closed forever to the rude intrusions of a mad, mad, world.

I have roamed the rooms of that dead old house a thousand times. Its halls seemed finely fitted for the glitterati and aristocracy of the era, but the décor, while giving the distinct impression of being carefully chosen by the highly refined taste of some now-forgotten cognoscenti, was of a more curious and seasoned Bohemian design… While each room was different in height, width and girth, every space within possessed certain singular properties to which I can afford no reasonable explanation: There were no windows to the outside and thus, created a bitter darkness that hung all about and transmuted an odd cold to all objects therein. I could find no trace of the typical furnishing that one may find in such an estate of this caliber- there were no clocks in that house and though the housekeeping was impeccable, all the mirrors of each room lay smashed into bits upon the cool, living oak of the floors. Like the closed sanguinaria flowers found decorating each hall, there about seemed to hover the ever-efflorescent dreams of a younger and more vigorous man. That man, as if trapped within a slumbering body, a somber spirit that met from time to time with other spirits of this indomitable place… ...Moving in and out of the sharp rays of a single lamplight that shot its chilly rays ‘cross his crumpled face he spoke no words to them. He feared their blood lust; a fear that he could feel in the desiccated marrow of his bones by conjuring up some ancient, residual and nearly dissolved instinct. He feared their answers to questions for which he already knew the reply. Hence, the spirits remained silent, out of respect or mutual abhorrence I do not know, save one who said her name was 'Evanescent', which to the best of my hoi polloi education in such matters, I took to mean 'The Vanished.' She spoke in prose, and can still remember her favorite poem of which she offered no title:

With felted shoes She moves across the fractured bricks,
Passing brown flowers and dying insects and sour leaves.
Turning her face into the gelid wind,
She Breathed in deeply and rested her clouded mind.
Not glancing back for a single moment to her pursuer,
She walks on and on in the wormy mud.
Close behind the myrmidon – a loyal follower – Death itself,
Present and accounted for as always…as always.
Without premeditation or preparation,
Nor with reservation She departs this One world.
In a brief moment of intense excitement,
She finds herself slipping into … the … out.
She remembers how the tiny slivers from a cracked mirror,
Ground themselves into her feet.
And how the floor seemed painted pretty,
In flowing hues of hemoglobin-red.
Turning away from those visions
She grasps out at the cold green light of fireflies in the Dark garden,
Just like a playful child but now with hands numb and pale.
There is no pain and memories fade,
'It should feel like this? It should feel like this…'

At that moment I pictured myself alone and without form - by dismal fate and intricately constructed logic, my soul locked away never to rise again in this life. In the same moment I awoke - the stark silence and smell of rain mixed with dust woke me from an apoplectic mid-day slumber. Somewhere west of here, the distance being too far to judge, across the Great Plains an angry storm grew. Almost synthetically, I could hear (or feel, I’m not certain) the low, muted tones of thunder – too far for the higher and more familiar notes of lightening bolt claps to traverse. In the high plains storms always move west to east so I knew that by evening it would arrive, crashing down upon the dry grass and yucca of this place with all the fury of a Final War between God and Satan. I stood there for a long time gazing into the distance and breathing in that good air – air full of ionic charge and enriched with oxygen blowing in from the mountains five hundred miles to the northwest. I felt like smiling but did not; smiling would remind me of my humanness and I do not much like people, with all their irrelevant trappings. And in turn, they do not much like me.