what life have we lived?  Did we splash every puddle?  Did we run toward every curiosity?  And did we forget secure familiarity and embrace the unknown without hesitation?  How much of our conceived-at-birth perfection have we preserved?  Do you claim to have kept your truth unsullied within the transformative tempest of life, and if so, how will you make that claim anything but laughable?  These are simple questions, but impossible to answer, for we are self-biased judges of our own truths.  The simpler the question the more complex the answer becomes, for these questions tell us to look in, within ourselves and ask, "Who am I now?" 

Indeed, who am I now?  Though simple, it is yet the most painful of all questions for me to answer.  Now I am hesitant, now timid, now beholden to my fears.  I am hiding.  Tentative, I have emerged, testing the effect, and there was no trumpets' fanfare; no gathering waited to embrace me and calm my terror; there was no one who came to acknowledge my pain (as if it were the only pain that mattered in the world) nor any who could pity me sufficiently to satisfy my demands. 

After every half-hearted effort to enter life, I withdrew further into my hiding place.  There I have been able to survive.  But only to survive, not live, nor grow along life-directed lines, the striations of vitality which start nowhere special and lead nowhere new, but which would have led me through—and into—all that's real, and which might have led me to find all the things life promised when this boy lay as though sleeping on a cool grassy lawn with his arms open wide hugging the earth, when he read in the clouds of a twilight summer sky things that could have been, but never were to be. 

 the story is as old as the hills, a story of a battle unmet in a secret war of rage; correspondence from a conflict unavoidable that takes place even though I refuse to join the battle; a tragic message from a contest that bears an outcome no less real for my refusal to participate than if I had killed my opponent with my own bloodied hands—or been killed by him. 

We go on.  With hearts of lions we proceed through our kitten-lives; with Magellanic vision we find our hopeful paths through humble existences; and with hearts of gold—some more deeply buried than others—we pay the astronomical cost of our passage.  The length of our route does not matter, nor the weather on the way, nor the number of stunning vistas we encounter, nor the amount of opressive darkness we endure, nor the love we give, nor the hate we suffer; in the end, the invaluable life of the journeyer is exact compensation for the priceless journey's cost. 

We go on...

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