The Thoughts Loom

  Death is beautiful because it is the only thing in life that is completely true. Everything else allows excuses, delays, reinterpretations, and second chances, but death does not. In life, even when you become aware of your actions and observe your thoughts, you still have to live. Awareness changes perception, but it does not free you from your body. You still wake up inside a biological system that consumes energy, does work, repairs itself, breaks again, and repeats. Your mind reads the world while your body carries it, and together they continue this process without pause. Entropy increases, effort continues, and maintenance never really stops. Death skips all of this. It does not require participation, effort, improvement, or understanding. People are born, they suffer, they experience pleasure, boredom, loss, and repetition, and they argue endlessly about pain and suffering because life gives them time to argue. Life is not the same for everyone, and it never has been, but...

Dear …, I am writing to you. I had sworn myself to silence, but the silence has begun to choke me. Forgive me if I am too expressive -yet am I not allowed, at least once, to speak plainly? It was you who once unlocked the prisoners of my mind, who gave them daylight, who taught them to venture and to dream. Now, without you, they wander in the fog, leaderless, longing for your care. Perhaps some new shadow has fallen across your heart. If so, still I do not repine, still I do not blame you; I have no power over your heart. Such, it seems, is my fate. You are a kind and a giving soul; you, of all, know how to requite-do you not?. Remember the man who writes to you -who needs warmth, who fights to master his own thoughts, who cannot do so alone. Your silence has been like an untimed death; yet even now, I believe you cannot willingly wound what once you awakened. If these words reach you, let them be not a reproach but a hand held out across the distance. Forgive me if I am bold in this,...