As a blue-fire sun came up over the sea, milky and iridescent, there was no sound, there were no motorized noises, the world was sleeping and nothing moved but the water and the sun. The time was not important, but the thick of atmosphere and the damp of unknowing was. Jitters at the cold of morning. Trembling at what could not be said.

Lydia moved to make something fluid of her anxiety. Always. She wanted to be known as someone who knew herself well and was comfortable with that, because she did and she was, but she was never comfortable with the capacity of other people to see these aspects of herself clearly. Too much at stake, she would say.

One came to think: too much at stake to take a chance on being misunderstood.  But why?  Why at every moment was so much at stake?

I loved this way of concentrating universal truths and global risk into the idea of what another might hear.

In this way, her intensity overtook my capacity for calm or solemnity: these I gave to her, these rights and incantations I placed under her control, hoping there would be a cosmic reward.  We would battle together, and we would rest together, and she would see that I understood what was at stake and for that reason, was able to see who she was.

But one believes what makes the most bountiful world of comfort and knowing, in the moment; it is nearly impossible to shake this temptation, to walk in broad fields of zen discipline, clear of mind and flowing with the diaphanous mystery of what is true, or might be, and not inject our desire, our need, our insecurity.  She would see or not see what I knew of her, but not because I did or did not; she would see it because her soul was caught up with mine in a way that made sense to her, that gave plenty to her personal mythology.

Lydia came and went like the tides, and was a kind of respiration.  We breathed together, and waited together for the sunrise, and we moved toward a certain dream we never openly discussed and never put a name to.

The mystery of what collapsed, when I realized she would not be there the following day, is the mystery of what goes into willing, the will to give oneself up for something of this world, something impermanent, something the stoics would warn you will become like dust and earth and be reshaped tomorrow into something else.

There is a space of reason beyond loss, of comfort in the steel grip of doubt, that has come to exist because we know the kind of brazen pact of so many little unspoken guarantees, the haunted mornings we could not share, the quiet that was full of absence, and even the graces given me by people willing to hear of it, to want for it as well, to see the sublime torment of your distance…

we had spoken of breath, its role as salve and guidance, its ability to observe and to know urgency, to transmit the metaphysical, only by changing the rhythm of its one dance : we had offerred a word of advice to three lost souls —separately, maybe they knew each other and were intertwined in their unraveling— about finding the waves under moonlight, and then we talked in all directions about breath till the moon washed out in the frothy yellow morning, and I remember we said that stretch of sand, and the rippling hints of oceanic depth, glistening with the determined light of that moon that had come for us, would remain as it was, perfect and unassailable inside us and that only those who knew about our shared immortality, our grandiose heartwelling treasure of affections, could know about that breathing moon…

I remember it now, or it remembers me; I am made of that story, that metaphor, that matchless timing of souls, I am composed of that superlative getting-into, that seeping and evolving, that surpassing fixture, by the almost lamentably cumbersome sensation of being lost and adrift in beauty; that’s how I recall it, why I’m still searching, still fighting, still reading the signs, marking progress in the hopes of getting back to that, back to the place where we were one shape, one self, two kinds of agony and just marveling and pouring promises into the world…

One day there is full engagement, there is plenitude and clarity, there is movement and the need for movement, friction and the love of friction’s complicated figuring : then, suddenly, there is near total distance, a separation from what had been known and felt, a kind of severance, which the spirit and the mind can hardly make sense of : war, love, hunger, wealth, scarcity, injury, or pervasive change in one’s environment, can bring these sudden metamorphoses to the very forefront of lived reality, as if nothing but sudden and irreversible change were possible : few stimuli leave more work for the mind, more trouble in the depths of the soul, or more of a hunger for the feeble properties of language, in the hopes that something of what once was felt and good, might be saved : and there, in that want, in that instinct to continue but to figure and to paint or reconstruct, there is the basic urge of humanity at the edge, at the new beginning where everything seems to face the demand for flight, the lack of wings, the hard questions of hoping, moving toward, starting…