Glendorn, PA - 10-5-08 - 5 weeks into the worst year of my life

My misery is still there. I know that, looking out on the burnt colors of the lake and forest. I see with unfelt dread that time is drowning in the water of the lake, burning away in the shades of autumn laying themselves thick on the leaves. I think ahead in rare moments of solitude to that tenaciously encroaching hour when this escape will finally take on the mantle of a finished dream, and I cannot feel the dread. It is as if the unhappiness that awaits me has frozen or stumbles through my head with the backsliding, uncoordinated stagger of the events of a dream. I can’t even feel the insistent wistfulness I expect to find in this beautiful place, the arching yearning for time to stop. All my emotions have been somehow retarded by the brisk air, the totally separate place around me. I have been placed in a womb of sorts for a few precious days and birth will come, in a blaze of pain and light, but somehow I can’t seem to be present in that close future because everything is muffled. Some force outside my own sore head has taken from me all past and future so that the balm of the present can reach me. Time has stopped here but I know it will start soon. And what will I find then?