It’s cold inside. The winter has bitten back with tiny nips of darkness and blight. Mostly. Here the weather is warm and the thoughts are distant, tiring. Here the sun is bright and there is no threat of icy, slippery, travel – of all types. Perhaps only on the inside.

I do not like to cry and yet, there are moments of clarity where it seems so necessary. So rain-like. The quality of washing a city’s worth of grime from my thoughts and heart. My eyes become clear, lines and emotions become crisp. The depth of feeling swims in leaps and bounds only for a moment, then is gone. An eddy that held my fingers and thoughts, fleeting tidal wash.

Life continues. The sun slowly rises in its late-Winter ennui, stabbing at the morning with faint will. The wind is cool and stark, the city more so. It feels so, inside me. The struggle with human nature – the loneliness we seek to evade – haunts the backs of all our minds. Primate behavior drives it from the day-to-day but we all realize that it is there, lurking. We are singularly alone in our thoughts. All of them, dark and light, take only the inward path – like the oft-walked dirt short cut, where vegetation has pulled back and refuses to grow, like the hard cracked earth that allows nothing in, nothing out. We let our thoughts run those paths over and over until they become chariot ruts in the road of our lives. Time creates the lock: it’s hard to break out of the ruts without… without…

Direction. Will. Power. A destination. Vision.

What I thought would be my struggle is not. What I thought would be my nemesis is merely a shadow on a hazy morning, begging me to look at it while my real destruction lies elsewhere. It is not how I thought it would be, this life. Perhaps I’ve tricked myself before. Who hasn’t?

Now I wonder. Recently asked, “how have you chosen your course in life?” Answer, deciding upon the choices offered to me at the time. Perhaps its time to step up once more and make my own decisions, without the obvious question in front of me. I have so rarely done that. I’ve followed the rut until there was a fork in the road then made my decision then. Perhaps it’s time to look out beyond the road, beyond the sheets of dark clouds and rain.

I’m looking for a light in the darkness, a path I can follow. I’m looking for the right light broadcast from some dizzying place that reminds me of my true self. Is the lesson that I am the light, that the path lies of my own choosing, my own thoughts. Creation in the palm of my hand, in the slant of my thought, in the weave of my own imagination. What can my life be if not my own perfect creation? It’s time to let go of all the fetters, of all the illusions of safe. It’s time to close my eyes and imagine more than a road, more that the well-worn ruts of others. It’s time to dream. What world can my mind grow?

–TDD