The river must have overcome the confines of its banks during the night. Today it flows among the tree trunks, muddy and violent. I watch from the wooden footbridge. People pass by behind me holding umbrellas. Never liked umbrellas, myself. I’d rather feel it. Recently, I’ve found, movement has been more a matter of going away from things than to them. I don’t mind this so much. I’m used to this, especially in the winter. Winter is a time for late nights, steaming teas, and new musical discoveries. It was last winter when I found out who I wanted to be, and I found the music that would cradle me as I trudged through the snows of doubt. This winter, I’ll consider that destination with more scrutiny than ever, and what it means for me and my kind.

I’ve been moving away from things, and my steps are growing more measured, more confident. The great social nausea is blossoming in me again like a prudent flower in the autumn rains. Tired and dying it will adorn the hillside with a spark of rebellious color. I know what it means now. I know it is the gateway to self-discovery, to the great Going Under. And so down I shall go, inside myself. And looking outward as the air grows cold and the days short and spiteful, more and more I will see my own reflection. And with the first flake of snow, I hope, I will see the crystallization of my ideals. And the coming of age of what I consider to be the most important project of my life so far.

The moth, searching for the mountain flower. And the Two Person. Oh, that raging paradox of self and self love and self loathing, of tragedy and comedy! A binary of ones and twos! A being of two faces: the two theater masks of the authors that tower above my dying thoughts, a dead pixel on a screen fed by rusty vacuum tubes. The most beautiful thing. No longer can I allow my paths to be twisted and scenic and kind to my soles. My feet must be worn and bloody, my road straight and true. And as I search for the definition of truth and straightness, I can only dream of the days when I was but a cloud and a manifestation of the winds. Now I must fight those winds, once my dearest friends. Now they are obstacles and ugly ones, with no will of their own, that rain cruelty on the world when the pressures of gravity no longer allow them to hold their density. A sad twist of fate is this betrayal. The clouds are beautiful but they are pliant and vaporous. And to them I must be the ugly one, a staple on one corner of their rambling essays, a hammer of virtue, a tiny point of the greatest thickness. And one day I will have all I can possibly bear, and I will implode, and I will become a force bending the very fabric of time, from which not even light can escape. Then you fellow wanderers, you will be pulled to me, and I will be the one you move away from, until you find the strength to go toward your own triumph: your most beautiful thing.

Or so I like to think. But I’m not all of that. Not now. Not yet.

Not yet.