3 am, another uneventful ending to another uneventful evening; they're all uneventful these days. The fact that I'm disappearing in so many ways doesn't so much bother me; what does bother me is that I'm not bothered at all by this voluntary vanishing, by the fact that I don't care to paticipate in the plays i used to love to act as a part of, or show my face in the places that have infused my cheeks with colour and life, or the fact that I'm so willing to give up on so many people I've been before to grasp what at times, feels like nothing more than a sober awareness of the lack of divide in a succession of snow days. None of it has really bothered me though, not even my need to watch the one thing I wish to never think of; the clock of course, yet there it sits so high still always visible to my eye; a place it used to laugh down at me from, but it seems to know there's little use in laughing at someone who isn't listening; perched on a ledge too tall for me to ever climb upto so to pop the batteries from out the back, I see it standing there, and it sees me sitting quietly down here, and I do not think of my powerlessness with melancholy anymore, I merely say, 'okay'. This reflection upon our relationship, the clock and mine at a state of peace, from this dynamic emerges a slight sense worry within me, I don't feel inclined in any one direction as of late though, but I imagine this state of calm might begin to affect me very soon; as the river freezes and the waters take new shape, for, the synthesis to sober rationalism and static living while standing submerged in this river who's flowing never ceases has always been a need....to scream..to swerve...to something...oh how odd it is to wish for that same dialectical result to find me again, and shake me from my comfortable winter sleep, to wish for that same skinny shadow to creep into my room and unwrap me from underneath my blanket of scholarly smarts and take me by the hand and lead me out into the snow only to smack me in the face and say, 'Look man, you`re no longer a boy. And, soon you will have to leave this place! So do something!' Only to disappear and leave me shaking in my booties in the middle of somewhere strange before I can ask him what it is I am to do. So, if I read him correctly, then I too find my meaning in the paradox, that I am only fulfilled when aware that I am perpetually unfulfilled; my comfort in discomfort., deliverance in my knowledge of my confinement. I go digging through the desk drawer thats stuffed with old essays, tests, scribblings on scraps of paper from the days when I was living to lose my mind, so many old journals. I open to a page of a blue journal to immediately recognize that it was the journal I took with me to Greece; I begin to read, only to read the whole thing through, a painful adventure I embark upon while re-living all of those nights of inward yearning in that dry heat, where I wore a mask of cerititude to hide a burning need to feed some invisible fire; to feed that unintelligble flux that has always demanded new of me, its servant, to fetch new pretty things to burn. I masked my charred soul with the face of someone who knew that life was meant to be spent living rather than slowly dying... of that I could be sure. The entire trip is there, written on the pages for me to relive. There I am, a mad boy torn between utter depression and soul; elliot smith and stevie wonder. The embodied dichotomy of a confused kid, and the historical-psychological synthesis was the passional torment that was me at the age of 23... oh how it all comes flooding back to me. And then, that frightful feeling washes over me, and once again I become a baby left unattended to in a bath of running water. What a frightening feeling it is when one can`t make a sound when there aren`t any ears around, for how I can I train these baby legs of mine all on my own to stand up straight and escape..I can not, so I must learn how to breathe under water. This is what I have seemingly done as of late, become one of the ones who solemnly swears to swim in a sad state of acceptance. But like I said, it`s only sad when one still wishes to be saved. And that wish, was what I always recognized as essential to me. I would`ve been left there to drown, left lying at the bottom of the Aegean sea had I not taken the time to write out these summaries, these letters of salvation to an unknown future me. The thought of forgetting is what awakens me, what has always awakened me from my sleep on a shiver; for, in those moments when one wakes from a dream where they have just been killed, for a few fleeting seconds they possess the feeling of what it means to die; our human hearts will always find this feeling horrifying. And in those frightful moments, I scramble to turn on the lamp on the bedside table, find a pen and paper if only to remind myself to remember, for if I do not, then every previous version of me has already died; if so, then so too have I, this version who writes down these words, still horrified by the blackness that consumed me in the last moments I spent lost inside my mind. For down in the blackness at the bottom would be my fate, had I not chosen to dive into the sea on a rescue mission in search for the treasure chest which entombed me. But, with sober eyes I have passed over the idea time and time again lately, that death puts an end to all memory, so one musn`t waste their lives holding onto the past, but I see little value in seizing the present before me if this is so, for surrounded in snow I now stand, and when the showers of spring come, if I am not prepared, I will lose grip of everything I have held this winter, forced to change my clothes all over again, and step into the shoes of an older man. So what will all of this have meant to even me then. I seek a longevity for me that extends beyond this fleeting second. The question comes to mind: just what is essential and unchanged within me that I can wrap my fingers around and carry with me until I die? Some part of my soul that will always be safely tucked inside.... I conclude that there is perhaps nothing to me other than the continuity of cosciousness, the perpetual succesion of presents `I` ride on, while the wind blows in my face and continually hammers away at its shape, and smacks everything I grab along the way out of my hands...parts of me but possessions snagged along the way, leaves I pull from the branches I pass to be blown from my fingers and left on the street behind me, never to be revisited, for the tracks I leave line a one way street. Lost fragments I will all be, unless I find a pen at the time of inspiration, scratch down my thoughts and tuck them safely under the seat to always carry within me. Reading the voice of that boy, just more than a year ago, I know that he and me have very little in common, sadly. But, like old friends we are re-united. I never repeat the word 'fire' to myself anymore, the word was everything to me then, it was what gave me all of my strength, what made me so weak when I was without it, 'fire', as simple as it sounds, was intuitively everything, the word on its own bared striking power that I used to know how to embody; it was the rudimentary principle in my core philosophy, and from the word I built a world. A gateway into a new reality. Without the fire I was dead, completely complacent in the present tense. The word was a way of seizing everything, the gateway escape from insecurity and monotony; burn burn burn boy i would tell myself, for fire is the only true thing and there's no question about it. Stick your face in the flames and let them scorch your skin.... this was the only way to live. I think that me would look at me as dead, but luckily back then I was mindful enough to stuff myself into a time capsule for this me to later on read, for his existence poses so many daunting questions upon me.Both in what our differences mean about life, and for what everything he stood for poses towards what I stand for. He would ask me, 'just why the hell did you go and put out that fire?....ahh I knew you always just wanted it easy...like every other adult who willingly sticks his heart in the ice box....just to make it easier...' To him I say, 'yeah it is easier, and im doing things you never could've done...the World isn't so hard to piece together when you're at peace with more than just prettiness on the suface.' Then i begin to think, i`m not at peace, I still can't stop looking at the clock and wishing it would slow down; regardelss of how easy previously difficult endevaours have become, the clock`s hands still swing with such devastating devotion. When every moment is spent soberly rational and aware I may be okay in a more calm way, but the itch to make it stop has never stopped asking me to scratch. When I exist in a continuum of sober moments there is only constancy to the passing, I wake from sleep, do some things, then lie in bed and wait for sleep to overtake my body with closed eyes. I miss the fire, I've missed it for a while....but I fear the fire, for fire burns! It really does hurt. It really does make everything harder....but that's what I recognized as me for the longest time.... The impossible need within every place holder I`ve pretended to be; but today i ask, what was that burning if nothing more than an outright `no` towards everything and an excruciating need for `yes`. Hence why I deliberate tonight and wonder what it was, or is about me that has always been, and will always be mine. I can think of no specific thing other than continuity of consciousness, and that paradoxical need... but even here I wonder if I can claim a continuity of consciousness, for such a claim of proof would only amount to an approximation as all windows to the past are frames filled with frosted glass, I know this, for how can I claim continuity, when just over a year ago, I was a very different me?...can I really claim that the stream beneath me has a consistency I have always been able to recognize as the same just by the way it feels when it rushes against my skin?...but then.... MY skin....have I not always said, mine, or I'm, or I, or me!!??.....would this change anything?.....no, just because I've been conscious, just because we share memories, that doesn't mean that all of the ones who have lived in this body, in this life, have anything to do with the present version of me....maybe they do, but only as forces in my historical dialectical development... I must then think, that that need is me and is what has always been me. I am that baby who can`t save himself from the bath tub filling with water; that is me. I`ve merely negotiated the problem in different ways, all of which have ultimately failed. `In his failure man finds his triumph` In impossible need, I find myself.