The stream I go a-fishing in.

How often it is that we speak with ghosts. Quarreling over regrets and, to overcome them, inventing past conversations so that we might replace the words that spurred regret's feet to dig into our present thoughts. Remembering a past happiness so that it will spread a smile across our faces again. We interact with those soft figures of our memory, and with a clasp of much closer import than the opaque faces before us as if they are blotting out the glow we wish to cast upon the past. But those ghosts are the ones that brought us here, after all. They are the ones that gave all of our parts their shape. Perhaps we owe it to them to search them out through the mists, to correct or to relive. Perhaps we do not want to admit its impossibility.

A fabric huge rose, like an exhalation.

There is a mountain here, a bursting scape of defiant nature that rises up through the concrete at the center of the city. Though countered with superficially sliced walking trails, the fingers of its trees yet stretch over to either side. It is a bastion.

Though, compared to others, it isn't as much a mountain as it is a very large hill. Most say that you can reach the top in a half hour's walk. Still, like so many other things, I insist upon turning its climb into a metaphor. So I tell myself that I need to prepare, that I need to climb it only when I'm ready and have the right shoes. When saying this, I heard "You could just do it now," and, "You don't need any shoes other than what you already have."

Nothing subliminal was in those statements but, like ascension, I ran away with them to grow even more metaphors. There are two very separate appeals in making a climb. One is the excitement of going as you are and seeing what happens, an appeal of uncertainty. The other is the excitement of knowing what you are about to do, an appeal of having made proper preparations. Wonderful things can happen out of either method if the circumstances allow. But is one better than the other in all instances? Or, can one plan to be sporadic? Whatever the case, the benefits are never known until you are standing on that mountaintop. And once you are there, the method never matters.