Even In Its Darkest Hour, The World Carries Good People On It. And We Must Fight For Them. Love Is Sustainable,

Scales painted like fingernails in an array of cobalts, blacks, and periwinkles danced around me in reflections and refractions in the crystal clear water. She circled me, playing with me, I thought. Though I know now she was playing with the sun, and I was a lowly witness, only in the way of her serenity. I didn’t intend to startle her when we met eyes, it just sort of happened that way.

They say a burnt child loves the fire; a drowned woman, too, loves the sea. And even more so the siren that dragged her to the bottom of it.

Indecision, my worst enemy, my bedfellow, my self. I look in the mirror and am met with a series of incomplete paths, loose ends, commitments unfinished. I am torn each way and no way, my spirit has been drawn and quartered. I watch my friends walk the straight and narrow line. I envy their distance, as I sit in the stagnant waters that grow higher and higher. Instead of standing up and walking away from it all, I tread water. You can always stay in the same place, contemplate the same questions, mull over the same potential paths, but the comfort the old routine brings you will fade away. That is one certainty I hold in my bundle of uncertainties. This life I live will get worse.

Hope lives in the eyes of children. I can see that now that it has left mine.

I fear looking into my adult eyes and not recognizing myself.

The AI’s weakness, hands. The closer it gets to the tips of humanity’s fingers, our very identity, the more it fumbles and struggles to execute. As if it knows not that it cannot but that it should not paint for us while we toil in mundane repetitive tasks.

Man is turning itself into machine’s workhorse. Fools with knowledge become not wisemen, just more efficient fools.

Fires burn in the shape of mountains, mere miles from my porch step.

The vegetation cries in red and grey.

My feet in my front yard grass ground themselves there, against the peeking patches of dirt hiding beneath the stiff yellowing blades, as if nature itself is afraid to look at its destruction. I cannot look away.

Our dry seasons get drier, rain will become myth, and water legend. I wonder when it will be my turn to record the destruction, to tell others of what happened to me, and not hear of what happened to others. I wonder if that day will be today.

In the blue hour, we find each other. Our voices are the only that exist.

Living in an anxious mind, I know fear intimately, I know nervousness like a favorite cousin-always sitting by me at dinner, insisting we stay in to watch movies instead of go out for dessert because when we go out I don’t enjoy myself at all. Too worried about the drive home, where I’ll park, all the trivial details that make it so I can’t taste the ice cream anyways. And don’t mistake me, I favor my fear just as much as it favors me. It keeps me comfortable, and how I love to be comfortable, though it’s a shaking uneasy kind of comfort. The sort a doomed man has on death row.

Algae bloomed on the face of the lake at summer’s height, like zits in bundles of thick and slimy green. The siren that dwelt deep in the lake’s toes could not bear the warm swampiness, it drove her mad. Not only that, but her sailor girl, her shining beacon of hope for food had wounded her in her escape. She felt rotten, her gash festered in hot white patches. No food, no beauty, no cold deep blue lake water to retreat to. All that was left for her was a walk. To find the sailor girl and give her what was coming to her.