you are alive and safe. now. it could easily have been otherwise. it was going to be otherwise in the last few months.
i didn't know what to think of when i heard. then i realised i don't have to. but it still didn't matter. i thought about you and felt sad. not because of you. i don't have the capacity to be so humane at the moment, though i acknowledge that you need someone to feel sad for you and understand. but i won't do that. i don't even want to find out if i can do that.
i could only feel sad for myself. it's been a few years. i thought i had it all down, at last. but i was wrong. i was back in that space where i'd been three years ago in no time at all. i whispered another possibility goodbye.
i thought exorcising myself of you would do the trick. but i forgot the fear, the grief, the fatigue. you don't exist anymore. but the rest of it does. and it's still crowding people out.
i can't figure out if i've sinned or wronged enough or it's simply time to call for a review of my karmic scorecard.

one of these weekends i travelled on a train. just a couple of hours. but it totally messed me up
in just about the time it took me to finish reading the gossip columns and down a cha, the scene outside had gone all green and brown. it was just something else. i could see to the horizon and it was almost shocking. like my eye would take it in and do a double-take like it's not supposed to see that far. alive, shimmering greens dotted with yellow, a nice dusty winter brown lined with farrows, a piece of sky on the ground with the clouds slowly getting under the water hyacinths, and darker woods in the shades looking just the way the night does during summer when you suddenly wake up and look outside trying to remember what you were thinking before you fell asleep. it was so big, so alive. and it just felt like this is what reality is and the boxy cities are just blips that take themselves so seriously that they start existing and spreading on sheer will power.
and while i was tripping on this, i saw an engine. THE engine. red and shiny and had a pointed nose. sleek, powerful lines and a menacing air about it. i totally fell in love and i want to be an engine driver again. i just can't fathom how i could let that dream go as i grew up. my choices as a three-year old still hold good. before i die i want to be an engine driver. like that bulgarian or prussian king. he'd drive the orient express and then when people got scared of diplomatic deep shit if an accident ever happened, he was banned. he simply decreed that when the train would be inside the borders of his country he'd be the only one allowed to drive. i want that. not the country, but definitely an engine.