15 march

For all the ACTs, for all the college visits and grand scholarship plans, i am still in the quiver. Subconscious wraps tight arms around itself: there must be a starting-off place before the arrow flies, before it lands. Before i am swallowed by the great engulfing freedom of Belmont or Samford or Emory or Auburn i've got to find someplace where i'm at to dig my heels in and call Home. For all the beige carpeting and Kashi bars, i'm sure as the dickens not there yet.

I am peeling off layers of consciousness and healing; detaching myself from the girl pressed beneath my father's godthumb and raising myself under surrogate guardianship. Oh, you do not know it, all of you, but you are my fathers; every single one. You are Adam and Eve and my Mother and Father. I am learning that the line is infinitesimal, so very small, between great loving and great hate.

The future squints a cold improbable fisheye at me and refuses to be anything but a vague and unintelligible blur. For all the meticulous planning, what can we see past our noses but a beecloud of untranslated godspeak? The past shuts up tight like a clam. I am left with: now and the next few seconds. What a flimsy and disconcerting thing, to live paper-thin and godlike in the slack waltzing drumbeat of the present.