There’s this game I played during gym class when I was eight, when they sent me to the outfield during baseball.

Goodnight from this side of the unlit globe, where I spent my day taking deep breaths, holding imaginary hands, and kissing air.

Where I’m writing this there’s an ad for high heaven.

There is some mystery in the world, some symmetry, and some understanding. The last thing I expected to find on the other side of the world was home.

I grew up in the seedier parts of the Bronx, New York. To stay out of trouble, I turned to art. Hiding out and growing up at the Metropolitan, I would rush through the galleries, memorizing and comparing a stroke by Rembrandt to one by Velazquez, and then Monet. I spent a lot of time comparing the strokes of painters.

They walked, hand in hand, down their favorite streets, peeking up inside windows with half drawn curtains, lit up dining tables, whispering and laughing.

Things will go wrong.  They will go wrong more often than they will go right.  You will only notice this for a brief moment because you are the type of person who doesn’t make up their mind easily.  You don’t like absolutes and you don’t like the concept of right or wrong.  You relish the in-betweens. 

You are slowly being destroyed. It’s imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a year, but you are aging, and your body is degrading. As your cells synthesize the very proteins that allow you to live, they also release free radicals, oxidants that literally perforate your tissue and cause you to grow progressively less able to perform as you did at your peak. By the time you reach 80, you will literally be full of holes, and though you’ll never notice a single one of them, you will inevitably feel their collective effect. Aging and degradation are forces of nature, functions of living, and understanding them can be as terrifying as it is gratifying.

“Pretty soon the world’s gonna throw you off its back,” she told me, letting go of her glass and placing it with three fingers on the step below.

“What will you do when the subconscious becomes the button on your sleeve; what will you do when gravity tears it off and you can’t find a replacement in a small plastic ziplock bag, no string in the package and no button in sight?”

“Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” She looked for her watch and said, “I’m optimistic.”

I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.