dec-

For all the presumptions I make about the episodic nature of identity and events, I never presumed my life could feel so neatly divided into decades: the pastoral late '80s bled into the '90s, which tasted humid, like candy and sweat. At the turn of the millennium things grew sharper and more brittle, I plated myself with chrysalis-armor and withdrew though it cracked still.

I am making generalizations; they are inappropriate. What I mean to say is now I find myself at a cusp, in the same positions, but different, and in different positions, but the same. This body feels tough and unfulfilled. There isn't a child here anymore, though; there cannot be. When there is not a girl or a woman or a mother or a lover, can I cease for a moment.

I need to find a way to de-justify my various internal karmic jihads. That is to say, I am aware that only pain is invited when I go about in a state of deserving, even with concurrent awareness of the eternally troubling imbalance of everything.

What does one do with oneself.

What does one do with oneself. When youth feels like winter. Is this a consequence of having already lived though the greatest fear; life becomes an anticipation of pain, regeneration is slow and the story loses elements each time you tell it, becoming fanciful, this is being passive, perhaps. Aggression, too, does no favors.

I am growing less indignant with all of this, you know, just working it through.