There is a moment when the road of destiny splits – a fork split moment – and the glass cracks and splits with a skin-tingling sound. The glass tears and continues to tear like construction paper emotional moments in your mind. After the car crash, everything moves in slow motion. Just before the shattering.

There are the dusty paths of bliss that ascend into fog-laced peaks of happiness. They are comprehended slowly and surely like the steps taken on a very steep sidewalk on the way home. They are treacherous at times, sticky and dirty at other moments. When one achieves the summit, there is the lookout moment, that piece of sky that stretches on forever into vastness of potentiality. It is when we forget to breathe thinking, this can’t be happening. Excellence overwhelming.

When the glass splits into the spiral, close to the essence of shatter, that is the cave. That is when the sound of tearing spinal cords is found behind closed eyes and shuttered minds. False and silly protection against the oncoming storm. It is conflagration at its purest burn. It is spontaneous crying and deep wells of hopelessness rising above the water table. Less river than deserted ocean of monumental proportions. The drain running down, clockwise into the cave of being. Darkness is lover and voice.

The trick, it seems, is negotiating these splits like a tightrope walker. Do we strap on the barrel and fling our souls into the Niagara tirade? That is the question we ponder on the brink. It teases us like a Texas shopping mall. Critical desire. We long to scratch the itch of immediate gratification. In a Hunter S. moment, we lust for the torture just to delve into comprehended loathing. We can just as easily flush it down the metaphorcial toilet and let the path take us where we will. It’s the emotional suicide that hurts the most – the body continues to breathe the event horizon.

Of all the things that ever will be, the now is gone. The revelry of feeling stays with us after the words have been spoken. Party goers blow horns and drink Sidecars and toke the hooka. Confetti tears. Confetti laughter. It’s all the same at this party. The silence in the corners where the mold grows and no one dances. The fringe is the best part, as we all say. It’s the crispy fat we all save until everything else is gone. It’s then that we realize that we should never have saved the best part for last.

–TDD