Wish key.

People go about it in different ways, it appears. Some of them drink their whiskey. Some people, they try to cut their hair, their nails, eyebrows, their eyelashes. They lay under the eyes of birds and bugs in the hot sun to burn out old cells. They cut their dog's nails, then their own toenails, and accidentally cut their finger on some thin paper. But when they get up again to look in the mirror, it is still there. It will still be there.

Miles to go.

I, in a fog, hear myself thinking about two things in the car this night: chocolate milk, and riding a steed at seven oncomers, pell-mell, pinching sweaty reins between my teeth. The whole of wide Ontario feels small, a midnight fog here making its own low ceiling and narrow walls. Two constant red lights above the road are glinting twins ahead of me, saying that they will never be reached. Now, while I look to the part of the world where vision and fog accost, I think to myself, What a jumble all of this is, isn't it? A ruckus, a fray. All of it, everything, all of us, it's just--and I want nothing but to sleep.

Timshel.

He lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation.

Lee wiped his steel-rimmed spectacles on a dish towel. He opened the book and leafed through. And he smiled to himself, consciously searching for reassurance. He read slowly, moving his lips over the words.

“Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

“Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.” Lee glanced down the page. “Thou wilt die soon and thou are not yet simple nor free from perturbations, nor without suspicion of being hurt by external things, nor kindly disposed towards all; nor dost thou yet place wisdom only in acting justly.”

Lee looked up from the page, and he answered the book as he would answer one of his ancient relatives. “That is true,” he said. “It’s very hard. I’m sorry. But don’t forget that you also say, ‘Always run the short way and the short way is the natural’—don’t forget that.” He let the pages slip past his fingers to the fly leaf where was written with a broad carpenter’s pencil, “Sam’l Hamilton.”

Suddenly Lee felt good. He wondered whether Sam’l Hamilton had ever missed his book or known who stole it. It had seemed to Lee the only clean pure way was to steal it. And he still felt good about it. His fingers caressed the smooth leather of the binding as he took it back and slipped it under the breadbox. He said to himself, “But of course he knew who took it. Who else would have stolen Marcus Aurelius?” He went into the sitting room and pulled a chair near to the sleeping Adam.

Fear is proof.

Across the lane from the lawn bowling fields is a small building with pale siding, housing what I imagine to be lawn bowling balls kept within the world's most uncrackable safe. I pass this by every day on my walk to campus, but on this sunny day I rounded the far corner of the building to be stopped, face to face with seven or eight Canada geese who all too hurriedly flew off upon my intrusion. I turned to where they flew from and saw that on the side of the building was spraypainted, in two separate spots, "CARP" and "CK THE RICH." Suspicious.

Dry awakeness.

Felt like it was arriving right just as I was leaving class, a flash freeze this past week that interrupted a few days of warmth. When it does, the wet from the couple days of thaw before gets caught, still hanging in the air as it frosts on us. Everyone walking with their shoulders bunched, hurrying home to whatever luck awaits them there.

People were walking quickly. They were bustling to resist the cold, with a slight lean and eyes leading along the ground about ten feet before them--all except for this one standing on the bridge. He stood straight, and he was round and motionless with hands tucked in khaki pants. He stood standing on the bridge ahead of me, not noticing the traffic or passersby, but looking onto the cold river below and at the sunset over the park trees, away in the distance and looking like the bright fade of watercolour. There is a long hill that runs downward on my walk back home, and the whole time I walked it I could see this person standing there, through the lengths of minutes, looking out to the frigid water.

He was watching the group of geese and ducks who had remained the whole winter and had formed some kind of a fraternity. All day they were sitting there, it seemed, every time I walked past them to campus or with our boy on a leash. As I got closer, the whole picture looked better--the unmoving smear of pink and purple against grey sky, hanging over the bridge and the icy river flow. I was just about caught up to the onlooker. But in a flash, the birds all decided to up and fly off down the river and into the sun. He watched this too, then slowly turned and walked away.

The consolation of life.

What else, but that after deciding to eat one million cookies, I run short by about a million less a couple dozen.

I then thought that I might clean out my old email drafts, and wondered whether I should now send them all to their originally intended recipients. Maybe like a slightly discomforting, ghostly revisiting of circumstances long past. There were three and four year old letters of advice to friends who were deeply lost in their troubles. But maybe like finding an old letter or to-do list in something you haven't worn since a couple winters ago. There were all kinds, but what I liked most was a long, long exchange about a Doggie. A silly experience of a radio show turned somehow injurious for my good friend Greg. A reply to the request for a water bottle. A whole-soul, half-sentenced response to being told I was brave three years ago, incomplete because of the inevitable limitations that are given to all-of-the-heart expressions when they are verbalized.

Twenty-nine email drafts that have accumulated over the last five years or so, residing in their incompleteness as accidental reminders of complete, bursting moments, and how all continues here, in this day.

If lookin' likin' move.