Worthiness and directionality

What's it worth, I wonder, Willard, trust, a life, the sort of life I thought I'd lead, the sort of life I get to lead if I so choose. Beset by a specific longing, I--or maybe beset is not the word: perhaps this longing is a gift. It is a gift, a powerful one. The more I say it the more it seems the truth. The more I say anything the more it seems the truth. For a while at least. In another light the world is turned about and I think a different thing. Then reverse. We are biologized for it, the switch the flick the reset button and then we're righted. Or was that right? We might be blighted by a distant love, not know just how distant love is and what it means. Of course you should recognize love when it comes, you'll say, Willard. I can hear you now. But how to know? How to trust the self and its weird desires? It's as if there is no point in thinking because nothing is permeable, or all things are equally permeable, so that I have no frame of reference. It is like a blizzard, Willard, the sort I enter into willingly, or if not willingly then at least with some secret knowledge that I carry with me like a gift for whoever opens the door I might find my way to.

Every way I look is white. A room of it a heart of it a home of it a frozen toad. Each minute my feet feel cooler, the way you start to lose all feeling in a toe, as if it was a stone. Is it that I feel lost, or am I just not recognizing the way the light hits, the way to read the wind, the outline of the weathervane from a week ago yesterday? I see no doors. I am a boor, indelicate, undecided. I no longer know these weather patterns: nothing is clear. The sun is rare. All is drear and bleary haze. In dreams I never feel my agency. This is not so far from that.

Of course that is too a lie, I know you'd say. I'd say it too. Is it that I know but cannot bring myself to say or act? Is it that the truth I once believed about myself will not hold? These fantasies--these ghosts I summon up--are they just that, driven by impossibility? Or are they keys to another life, a brighter side, a glimmer in the storm? They could as easily be fault, a long hold, a winding stair to nothing, repeating patterns leading to the same self I was before.