Say Aum.

Meditating always gives me a migraine. Heightened hearing and razor reflexes, but also migraine. Beautiful or not, Truth warrants migraines. As well it should.

How else is one to be pinched awake from time to time? How else do you send packing the last few years in a much-stamped suitcase to Abu Dhabi?

Pop an aspirin and keep your x-ray vision on, troopers. Illusions, though happy, are treacherous places to make camp.

Cruelty is often just restraint.

Choosing not to smile and say "It's quite alright", deliberately pocketing the hand that reaches out, stamping out the instinct to protect. So easy to maim their smiles by just holding back.

But this deflection of what the heart otherwise would: is that easy?

of familiarity that should not be

One must begin Mrs. Dalloway alone on the roof. Discovered this this afternoon in a Woolf class. This woman, this woman who wrote from age five, because she must. This woman who, preoccupied with The Mother tried, tried ever so often to end everything - or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely - overjoyed at getting the right to write anything at all, for it cohered her, healed her, made her one self. She who placed herself next to Mansfield and shrugged, meh; I ought to do better. She of the acid-tongue journalistic school; she who hated to love.

One must not proceed in this vein because of course, there will never be a Lenny, oh Lenny but also because there will never be death by water. For even though, when one first heard of how Woolf walked into Hades, at eight - when she knew all about wolves and beetles, but not in Uppercase - and one tried re-enacting it, it was all in queerious jest; it was after all, stones in fist because swimsuits don't come with pockets, because it was not a river but the ocean inlet at Corbyn's Cove. Analogies are dangerous.

One must beware of those who seem to get too much. Besides, one was born into sane family and cats and dogs, heralding the twenty-first century. It shall take forever for a room of one's own but still there's the water tank and a ladder leading up to it.
Alas, At last, At least a reason to thank one's anachronistic existence.

Wheels > Toes

Driving is an alienating experience. The car is not me, and yet I am it. Perhaps it slowly becomes us; like our heels or our lashes. Like every irrational foreign protuberance we learn to control, learn to accept gratefully as our indispensable, shiny, supple limbs.

We (in time) learn to part our hair, smile whenever the occasion needs us to. And although we still blink, sneeze, we no longer cry out in alarm. We accept our eructations and flatulence and usually let them pass without much comment.

Perhaps I too shall one day accept my swerves, near schoolgirl road kill, that one too-wide turn. Till then, let me draw the utmost satisfaction from the steady steer, gentle over-riding of speed breakers, umbrella insurance for dogs. It has only been four lessons, after all.

Evolution

Look at it this way, if a month later you're still alive, you can run - nay, skip - through the same gauntlet as many times as you like. I'm on this side, I'm on the other side; I'm on fist side, I'm on nother side. How's that for boss battle victory? And no one to divide spoils with. Torture ftw!

Silence/One Tight Slap?

It's not esprit d'escalier if one chooses to retain the observation slash retort. Not many see this, those who do will never tell. To prevent another (heaven forbid) amity grown habit grown cult.

As for the rest, one wonders. Would it have been worth it, after all, if on some ill-begot morning, one should decide to give up (for a day) the Omerta and  slash (with observation slash retort) offender and put the world in its rightful place, tucked in that exact bend of the right ear-canal where the wax begins to crumble?

What sort of triumph comes of giving up what sets you apart? (that's a single question)