Here We Are On The Road. We

...wanting Change Is Step One, But Step Two Is Taking It.

She Gathers My Half Of The Blankets Around Her And Curls Up Against The Wall. She Will Sleep For Hours More, Dreaming Endless Landscapes And Novas Of Colour Both Gorgeous And Frightening. If I Stayed She Would Wake Up And Describe Them To Me. All The Mad Plot Twists And Surrealist Imagery, So Vivid To Her While So Meaningless To Me. There Was A Time When I Treasured Listening To Her, When I Found The Commotion In Her Soul Bitter-sweet And Lovely, But I Can No Longer Bear It.

And Yet ... But What If ... I Want To Do Something Impossible. Something Astounding And Unheard Of. I Want To Scrub The Moss Off The Space Shuttle And Fly Julie To The Moon And Colonise It, Or Float A Capsized Cruise Ship To Some Distant Island Where No One Will Protest Us, Or Just Harness The Magic That Brings Me Into The Brains Of The Living And Use It To Bring Julie Into Mine, Because It's Warm In Here, It's Quiet And Lovely, And In Here We Aren't An Absurd Juxtaposition, We Are Perfect.

What Happened To The World Was Gradual. I've Forgotten What It Actually Was, But I Have Faint, Fetal Memories Of What It Was Like. A Smoldering Dread That Never Really Caught Fire Till There Wasn't Much Left To Burn. Each Sequential Step Surprised Us. Then One Day We Woke Up, And Everything Was Gone.

He Is Spent. His Mind Is Mercury Again, Its Brief Surge Of Humanity Melting Into An Oily Residue On Its Surface, And He No Longer Understands The Feelings He Felt In That Strange Moment On The Overpass. But He Did Feel Them. They Did Happen. They Rest On The Murky Seabed Of His Mind, Buried Under Sand And Silt And Miles Of Grey Waves. Patient Seeds Waiting For Light.