Life, The Edge, The Breath, The Pause

How do you sum up a life in 5 words or pages or books or decades of writing for hours a day with no break and endless hemming and hawing about all it was or wasn't or could have, should have, would have, might have, wasn't but who's to say what matters in it all --

Birth and death are the bookmarks ends... but maybe I was right the first time... with divisions of no set length birth and death and years, months, shorter shorter lately maybe, well its not so scientific but it is one divider, however doesn't it all just start to blur together, and how many of you just wanted to burst into song, letting loose all those seconds when you read that first line, just me?

That's okay, I'm used to it. Miles work too anyway, the ones traveled or the ones in between me and family or the metaphorical ones between what I thought it would all be and what it is, between who I am and who he is and who we thought 36 would be and how can 30s feel so old and so young at the same time, when I might as well still be in college and drinking beer that tastes like piss --

Vomiting up sloe gin that looks like blood, studying Chinese characters while standing against the wall at a party (that was the best grade I got on a vocab quiz) knowing that there is no where else I'd rather be but also somehow that it was all pretend, and I can't pretend that wasn't a lifetime ago.

::Breathe::

Sometimes everything rushes by so fast that I can't catch my breath, but it is also endless... did you know that they say there are more suicides in genius youth because they figure out so early that there is no point to life besides just living it, no great reveal, just these days of passing and what is the point, and I think 36 is still too young to know that, but at least here we can see the beauty too --

Thirteen thousand plus sunsets and rises and days and nights, but I don't see sunrises very often because morning sleep is the best sleep but maybe I'm missing out too; but am I because can't travel be written as distance x time = the great big gulping pause --

::Pause::

Its both endlessly frustrating and also so very reassuring that life keeps going even when your checked out, that the pause is really only pretend, and when you let out that little shutter at the end of the gasp and return to your regular pattern, well it all just rushes back --

Talk about a regular pattern, I think marriage is just opening the dishwasher and wanting to throttle someone for it all. being. wrong! but instead just thanking them for doing it, and I swear that if we had a mattress the size of our whole bedroom, and we drew a line down the center, I would still end up smashed against the edge --

I have early memories sitting on the stoop of our house in Allentown, just the moment and nothing else, and remember being in the hospital with dehydration when the spaceship Challenger exploded, and then vividly I flash ahead to the night that my heart sped to 200+ bpm, a lamborghini engine in a VW Bug, and the moment they stopped my heart and I knew so surely how I had years to come --

And how do you sum it all up, with birth and death, and my own death then life, and how much do I have left and what do I want and I guess that it all comes down to this great secret: