Canadian Songbird

“Just leave me alone. I’m not myself. I’m falling apart, and I don’t want you here.”

“Her walk counted. The fact that she was out there alone with her thoughts. Not much had happened. It wasn’t on her. She was kind of sad and kind of free.”

We didn’t think about how difficult change can be, the wounds left behind when you abandon the familiar. No one really leaves the place where they once focused all their attention: They're uprooted from home and take a piece of it with them.

“Speak to me of things the world has yet to truly understand, of the instant meaning of each bird’s call, of a child’s secret thoughts in her mother’s womb, of the measured rhythmical time of every man and woman’s breath, of the true colors of the inside of the moon, of the larger miracles in small things, the deeper mysteries.”

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me.