All of the sudden, death seems possible. Suddenly I am sure that I turned a corner. My greatest charms stand behind me. I am waning into submission. I am not resting on my laurels, I have let myself be defeated by the prospect of living.

Life, at once, must prompt one to largesse. We must reach, fumblingly, stumbling up a mountain, pale and hungry. We must go on. I understand at the last that we have always been dying, folded into each other like the scales that make up a fish:

In some other sense, there are two characters reflecting each other in a mirror, searching for the other’s flinch, clarifying one last doubt. I reach my hand so close to the glass.

I do not want to touch, do not want the faint cloud of my breath to spark the dim light, do not want there to be a surface between us. I cry out for convergence, for clarity…

Life, always blooming, always pushing. At last it seemed like that struggle to be separate, that straining wish for individuality that is the testimony of our lives, our art, our dreams, that thing we do for love:

Somehow all that mystery yet to be uncovered, may go undiscovered during this iteration. My part in the whole, the force of this will, may not discover it.

I took hold of my own exotic potential. I burst upon the world. I was so many things. And all of it resolved at once to watching this woman and myself staring at each other, having endured so much more than I had imagined.

I was incredulous. It could not be that I had not foreseen, the whole time another reality was being formed of my actions, making them look somehow different than an act of consciousness:

A hallucination. A delusion.

I grabbed the sofa and threw it across the room. It could not be!

But then, it was already over.