Tonight the official time will change. The world itself was doing a good enough job of reducing light for the portion I live on as the cosmic dance with the sun continues, music shifting from summer melodies to a wintry dirge.
I am not where I usually am. Have I said? I'm no longer certain of anything, growing older in a world where much is going on to change the world it was for most of the time I was growing up. I'm in my sixth decade now, and I know there's a lot I can't explain to anyone.
A tragedy of my life has been the inability to describe how I experience the world to those who I want to be close to me. I routinely lose friends because my sensibility is colored by having parents who grew up in a different part of this world. They never quite adjusted, and now when I visit, I have to help one of them go to the toilet.
I'm not home but I am at home. I'm typing this at a bar where I've spent a ridiculous amount of time in the past two years. I've been up here in Yardley for four days now, and I'll be at my house in just over two days. I'm here and I'm not sure what to do with that information except wait to get back.
When I am here, I throw everything into work because that's the only way I can manage. I am aware there are a lot of things to do, and I'm only alive once. The change from summer to winter this year is stark, perhaps like all of the other. Being here when the official time changes shakes me and perhaps there will be some strange advantage to having it happened up here.
The last two months of this year are here, and what do we have to do except go through them? Barrel on down, me who I am, and all of that. I'm old now and less capable of feeling as alive but yet all of this is there somehow. I never quite knew who I would be, but I always suspected it would be like this, working as hard as I can with almost no ability to take any sort of satisfaction in anything I've done.
I hit publish and then the clock starts again, and anyone with praise cannot be trusted. The point is just to keep doing what I can to feel alive, when feeling alive is the blood coursing through my veins as I try to imagine that anything I do matters.
I am grateful for the blindspots built into me that will always reduce me to be a nobody. We are all born and we all die as no one. Why should we have any illusion we're important in the days we do our part drawing breath? Are we but mollusks?
I for one have a spine and a mouth and thumbs. I know I can adjust to whatever the world throws me. I know that the sun will rise again and I'll see the beauty of this planet as much as I choose to let it in. I am very guarded and I know I am not entirely charge of myself. I'm aware of the limits of being alive while I simultaneously feel alive.
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