. . . joyn the adventure .. .

all those years ago, you felt ashamed,

watching your father sob before you—for his actions, not yours. Or lack thereof. That he plead so desperately for, of all things, moderation and calm. Nonsense. Had he never, then, felt stirrings in his blood? Of course you would leave him, husk of a man—already you understood that the life he led, that same life you had led until that day, it was an illusion, mere simulacrum of contentment. Going through the familiar motions isn’t going at all: it’s staying. Stultifying. Nothinging.

Even if your instincts were foolish and wild, at least they were instincts, you had to go, had to know, and you rode all your passions away from my father’s house, hurried along by wild and indigested notion of raising your fortune, deaf to all good advice as you fell into the chambers of strangers, into the plots of villains and heroes, into danger, danger, death.

Finally here, to this tumultuous sea, as your body heaves up down upon cold unfeeling waves. 

And even now, in this half-dead state, waterlogged thought bubbling within your dim-pulsing body; even now, as your near-corpse is tugged across the seas, you try to understand. But you won’t understand. There’s no such thing. There is only living and dying.

Today, friendo, you live.

You come to consciousness in the ebbing surf on a sandy shore. Painfully, you uncrack your eyelids, rub away the sand and salt. As your eyes work to focus, you sense that it is morning, the hour before the sun, the daily letting of the dark eastern sky. You unfold your bent and half-broken limbs. After three steps you collapse into coughing fit, never mind the bits of blood you hack out. Get up. Move. So what if everything is damaged. Nothing is permanently broken.

For a time, you limp about on the shore, lifting up your hands, your whole being wrapped up in a contemplation of your deliverance; making gestures and motions which you cannot describe. Soon the sun peeks its awful eye above the brow of the earth. You begin to look more carefully around you, to see what kind of state you are in, what is next to be done. You are wet and a-shiver but have no dry clothes to shift to, you are ravenous and salt-parched, yet you have neither food nor drink. No weapor for hunting, no weapon for safety. You see little prospect before you but that of perishing by hunger or being devoured by wild beasts. In a word, you have nothing but the damp clothes pressed to your skin.

But it’s not nothing or maybe it is a nothing in the way that any nothing can be greater than an anything, any anything, any and even greater than the greatest any everything, who’s to nothing say that a thing is a no or any or

(Sorry, bub. Recent+current events have thrown you into such terrible agonies of mind that you have no choice now but to run about like a madman.)