#sam mills

Once, when I was seven years old, I fell off a swing and knocked myself out. As I came to, I became aware of life as a force, a gush and a rush of energy that was almost violent in its determination to keep oxygen flowing into my lungs and blood pumping around my body. For days afterwards, I wandered around the back garden, seeing its furious energy in the flutter of a butterfly's wings, or the arms of a tree reaching for the sky. I feel it now, gazing at a Waterhouse: in the weave and layer of oil and color; in his attention to the tiniest detail, in those strokes which are so beautiful that they feel as though they were painted not by him, but through him. This is what I am, I think as I look at it. This is me.

My problems are distant; I am buffered from the real world by hundreds of pages. With every day that passes, people will forget me, and, in forgetting, forgive the wrongs I've done. Jaimes and I could hang out here for weeks, interrailing through prose. Then a sadness laps against me, for I know that he will return, back to a life rich in love and fulfilment, and how can I blame him? Our ending is inevitable: he will leave and I will shock him with a coward's goodbye and here I will stay, drifting through books as I grow old alone, seeping into these pages like a watermark.

The pleasure of dancing is transcendent, as though I've been released from the machine of my body. All the best experiences - dancing, music, art - negate the body, even while they stem from it. Beyond my happiness, there still lingers an unease that is vague but more permanent than my immediate cares and concerns - a sense of something being wrong. But I'm used to that being the backdrop to my life. That is life.

Sam Mills To Be Inducted Into Pro Football Hall of Fame