Momentum

Another night at the wine bar, another day of photographs and cold wind, and strangers spitting on me and saying really horrendous things to me (the former I shrugged off; the latter made me cry, but only after I'd walked several blocks).

I wrote a very good poem the other day, on a piece of drawing paper, and it's been fluttering around my apartment, alighting here and there as if it has wings.

Someone is eating a slice of cake on TV, and I wish I could pull it out of the screen and have some. I thought today what a thin little line of people separates me from nothingness, from being completely alone in the world. Don't tell me that isn't true of you as well.

Well, maybe some people with large circles of friends feel more protected from the edge of the black. And maybe that is the real reason people feel compelled to have families. It's not even about posterity or immortality; it's an attempt to insulate themselves from loneliness, from the truth that Malcolm Reynolds puts so clearly, "Everyone dies alone."

So I suppose that being able to keep walking after a terrible old man says something terrible to me in response to being asked if I can take his photo - I suppose that is some sort of victory, or the only kind that we ever get.

The strength to just keep walking. Not, perhaps, to avoid crying when one is hurt; just to keep moving.