Do you remember the days when you counted seasons by the color of the sky? Hope cauterized, eyes the color of mirrors, breath like ash. I don't know if this is a story of you, or a story of me, or maybe it belongs to more than us. Maybe it is a story of all of us. The day arrives when we have not become who we wanted to be, and we tell ourselves that it's never too late, keeping falsehood pressed between our pages. There is always a time when our heads snap back, a sharp exhalation. We are rivulet and gully, the sculpture of our experience. No less. No more.

I have learned to wish for something difficult. For the time to do it. To become not a person but a stoic. For the solitude of deafening, numbing concentration. For the azure hum of thought. To forget that I am only the flawed anvil of want.

There are times when the mist of our many failures escapes, rolling in quiet, heavy tides. You could call it magic, but not the kind one finds in the deep hollows of second hand book stores where pages smell like other lives and other hands. Sometimes the rhythms of our realizations move like great, slow clouds. We remember how, a very long time ago, we weren't tame.