IT's only February and I'm already thinking of Eve. I guess it's appropriate. Her one year anniversary is coming up. A year ago, she was still alive, and probably more alive than most of us ever will be. She was unsuspecting. She had her whole life ahead of her. I only regret one thing: losing touch with a person like that, who did more in twenty-two short years than most people do in a full, long lifetime.

She was the first of four, but the rest weren't like this. There was always a cause, a reason: loss of intellect, leukemia, heart attack. But Eve died for nothing. There was no cause. No freedom to fight for, no ideology to save. Just...pointless violence because a teenager and a twenty-one-year-old were looking for money to blow and a thrill. So because of that, she got a shotgun bullet through her skull and four more pistol bullets throughout her body.

That's when I realized that I'd been wasting my time searching for the meaning of life. It really is 42. There is no meaning, except what you make of it, for yourself. In the end, we die alone just like we're born alone. The crowd surrounds us but we live our lives trapped behind our own eyes. All other perspectives are imagined.

I sang your song, Eve, probably twenty times yesterday. You're the bridge, you're the bridge, you're the bridge, and the point is to not be afraid. But I am afraid. I'm not a mystic. And I thought it was supposed to be me first, with the doctor's clock ticking so close now. Three-and-a-half years to go. I'll beat that, I'm sure now. As long as a tree doesn't fall on me, or I'm chosen for those mid-night games like you.

I'll dance like there's no tomorrow, Eve, like you did, because for all we know, there isn't. Everyone separates into factions: extremist this, zealot that, political left and right. The question is screamed out in the veins of all the people: "What do you want from us? What are we supposed to do? Sit back and take it?" So the bombs drop and the guilty and innocent, alike, are slaughtered. Nothing solves the problem.

Maybe you're lucky, Eve. You didn't get to witness this. The dead are the lucky ones. They don't have to deal with themselves, or the burden and the guilt the human race forever lays upon itself. No more searching for love or hate. Just eternal rest, eternal Oblivion. The cement must have been better than their eyes, when they left you lying there. No more fear. No more questions. Nothingness. For nothing.

As usual, I'm an empath, so the emotion wells up inside of me and I package it within myself because there's nowhere for it to go. I turn the music up really loud--I can't take it. Too much love turns sour after awhile when all it is is stagnant. Love turns sour, like rotten milk. If you open me up, that's what you'll find. Underneath, I'm still a little girl, poisoned by the whispers of Seraphim and impossible dreams.

I turn to small things, like calendars filled with Hopper's sunlight, and soapstone, ready for me to carve what God tells me is inside. I already know. It's myself. As cold and lonely and imprisoned as the stone with nowhere to go and no means of getting there.

But that's life.

Lone Dancer

Note: If anyone's actually reading this, which I don't think is happening, this is a song and sounds much better with music.

I almost died tonight walking on a foot of ice.
Well, that's life and it's not so high a price.

When I got home, I picked up the phone,
called a friend and he said
"Well, you just don't get it, do you?
Do you know what it's like to wake up alone?"
And I said, "Sure," because it's all I've ever known.

So I wake up early every morning and craft my day,
I tell him make it worthy,
it's the small memories that stay,
but don't dwell in yesterday.

I live for the moment,
so the present won't pass.
I'm slipping and sliding
and hoping that someday, Someday comes.

But he said "Well, you just don't get it, do you?
Life just full of lies."
And I said it's no big secret that the baby grows into the man who dies.
He said "You're too young and never have had to wake up alone."
And I said, "Youth is the myth of age and it's all I've ever known."

I almost died tonight walking on a foot of ice.
Well, that's life and it's not so high a price.

I'm the lone dancer,
Time circumvents my answers.
I tread on thin ice
and I fall through.

I'm the lone dancer
and I endure,
don't ask for an answer,
'cause this is all I've ever known.

Silver Roots

Phinnaeus Silver was a Doctor of Philosophy at a small university in New England. His life was simple and his time was happy. His wife, Cassie, was loyal and loved him and gave him five children: Judah, the oldest, who liked to climb trees and buildings and who loved the power of words; when he grew up, he wanted to be a Doctor, just like his father, but in the discipline of literature. Annie, who dreamed of going to space, who kept her body in top physical shape even at the age of fifteen, because she needed to be at the top of the physical game as well as the intellectual; she studied physics and mathematics and prepared herself for aerospace engineering. Mato, who read away his time, dreaming of other worlds while ignoring school assignments, but somehow, always got by well enough for his parents not to complain. Olivia, who loved to watch things grow and spent her time in the garden, planting, whispering encouragment and stroking baby leaves so that they might grow tall and outlive her. Agnes, the youngest, who trailed her father like a shadow, and whose grasp of his ideas surprised everyone.

Phinnaeus's particularly close relationship with his youngest child began when she was just four years old, when Agnes walked into the study and planted herself in the big, leather recliner while Phinnaeus was talking to himself out loud in preparation for a lecture on Boethius's concept of time. He turned to her and asked, "Well, what do you think, Agnes? Do you agree? Is it all just now, do we exist in one moment and the illusion of linearity, or is the line of time what's true?" It was meant to be a rhetorical question, and as soon as he'd asked it, Phinnaeus had turned back to his papers. Agnes surprised him.

"Just the dot, Pappy," she said and Phinnaeus turned back around.
"What was that?" he said.
"Just the dot," she repeated.
"What dot?"
"The 'now' dot," she said. "No line."
By the time Agnes was six, she'd sat in almost all of his classes and understood it all, although sometimes with a little help.
"My little genius," Phinnaeus said, ruffling her hair. The girl smiled up at him before skipping off ahead down the sidewalk.

Despite her grasp of complex philosophical ideas, Agnes was a relatively normal child and balanced childhood and intellectualism with an ease that bewildered Dr. Silver's colleagues and that please him and Cassie. Agnes would come home from academic immersion and probing by intellectuals and jump into the family activities. She'd climb trees with Judah, stargaze with Annie, sit reading with Mato, and get full of dirt, gardening with Olivia. None of her siblings resented her in the least. They loved their youngest sister and boasted about her almost as much as their parents.

So life went on until one day in the summer of Agnes's eight year. Twelve-year-old Olivia's plants were thriving, having been moved to her makeshift greenhouse. Judah was lazing around in his last summer before college and Mato and Annie were studying, as usual.
"Hey, guys," Olivia said, after she'd gathered them all together. "Let's do something together."
"Like what, Livia?" Judah asked.
"I don't know. Build a campfire or something. Just hang out," she said.
"Sounds good to me," Mato said, looking up from his book.
"Yeah, just put that down for a minute, all right?" Olivia said.
Mato sighed and dogeared the page. "Fine."
"Oh, come on, Matt, it's nothing personal," Annie said, poking him in the arm. "Plus, this'll be good. Our last stint together before Judah hauls off into the horizon of intellectual hermitage, right?" She grinned.
"Shut up, Annie," Judah said and rolled his eyes.
"Yeah, yeah," Annie answered.
"Ok, ok. Where's Agnes? She was just here," Olivia said, biting her lip.
"Oh, you know her," Mato said.
"Yeah. Probably lost in some book just like you," Olivia answered. He stuck his tongue out at her.
"Oh, come on," Annie interjected. "She's always late to everything."
"But she was just here! That's not being late."
"It's being vanished," Mato said. "But what else is new? She's probably with Dad."
"Ugh!" Olivia grunted and stomped her foot.
"It's all right," Judah said calmly. "I'll just go get her." He bowed out of the little clump they'd made in the backyard and turned toward the house. Agnes came bounding out of the door so quickly, it almost knocked Judah over.
"Whoah, there, missy! What's going on?"
"Sorry! I had to just get..."
"A book."
She nodded and blushed slightly.
"Well, I'd keep it far away because we're making a campfire. Come on."
Agnes put the book in her back pocket and followed her older brother back out into the yard where everyone else was.
"Ok. So marshmallows for s'mores, right?" Olivia was saying.
"Yeah!" Agnes exclaimed jumping up and down.
The Silver children set to work.

Agnes didn't realize what was happening until it was all over and by that time, of course, it was too late. She and her siblings had spent a good part of the late afternoon and early evening talking and singing, making s'mores and laughing about God knows what around the fire. Her siblings had tossed her around like a ball, a game they all played because Agnes was so little. She loved flying through the air and knowing that no matter what, someone would catch her. The five of them had developed a nearly perfect trust.

When they were done, with the summer air dry and hot around them despite the dark, with Annie's stars clear and bright above them, and with fireflies lighting up the air around them, blinking in time to the crickets' song, they put out the fire, covered the pit with dirt, and went back inside.

The burning started at the back of the house, so Phinnaeus's and Cassie's room got hit first. Sharing a wall with their room was Judah's and Mato's. The fire spread quickly. Annie smelled the smoke and was awoken by the crackling sound, and was the one who called 911. Olivia and Agnes were the first ones out, because they were at the front of the house, and they were the youngest. Annie ran back to get her parents and her brothers.

Phinnaeus had awoken to a room engulfed in flames, all exits blocked, and his wife already swallowed by them, screaming in agony and fear and calling out not for her own life, but for her children's. Annie ran back to find her father covered in fire, having run through the door despite the flames in order to get to his children. She watched him burn and ran without thinking to her brothers' room, knocking down the door and releasing the pressure, which released the fire and killed her instantly.

Olivia and Agnes were held by the state until the family's lawyers dug out Cassie's and Phinnaeus's wills. The two remaining Silvers, who happened to be the two youngest, would be sent to Georgia to live with Betty London, Cassie Silver's best friend and confidante, and her husband, Charles London. They lived on a farm where cotton grew along the fences and goats roamed the fields, where peanuts grew under the earth, where it rained oceans in the summer, and where the divide between human races remained at the forefront of everyone's mind.

Olivia was silent for a year after the death of her family, unresponsive, always staring off into the past. If only I'd just picked something else, she kept thinking. And she layed the blame on herself.

Although Agnes had the intellectual capacity of an adult, she was, essentially, just a child. Nearly everyone and everything she'd ever known was gone. She clung to her silent sister.

"Livia," she whispered. "Livia. It's me. Wake up, Livia."
But Olivia never answered. After a year of silence and numerous sessions with a variety psychologists, the Londons sent Olivia Silver off to an institution paid for by her inheritance. Agnes saw her once every three months until she turned fifteen. By that time, she couldn't take seeing her sister like that, refusing to eat, forced to be fed nutrition intravenously, saying nothing but the words, "I am guilty. I'm a murderer," if she ever said anything at all.

Agnes still remembered her family clearly and understood Olivia more than anyone could imagine. She thought back to the first day she'd exposed her affinity for ideas to her father, and to her assertion that time was a point, one, eternal ungraspable point and that the linearity of time was an illusion. It's funny, she thought, that I end up here, with the Londons in the deep South. Maybe two states over, from Faulkner's Mississippi. Olivia! she cried out in her mind. You've become Benjy and all pain is forever and ever and ever. Can't you make it joy, too? But she knew Olivia couldn't. Pain was more powerful than joy. Pain was sustaining and it corroded her sister away.

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?-- it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies." -Jack Kerouac, On the Road

I swear, you can go up and down, through hell and back and think you've seen it all. When my brother was around, we saw it all together, living from one bright moon to the next. But people aren't always around. We lived our lives like sand in the wind, never staying put for too long. Doesn't matter anyway. Whether you sit or whether you roll, the great world will beat you down or rise you up depending on the whims of nothing but complete and utter chaos. It all depends on the moment.

One moment at the dawn of our second decade and the eve of our first, Phin and I encountered a moment that changed us forever. But what can a ten-year-old do when it's him against the strength of a man and he's though up until then that the world is a fairytale? I guess me and Phin both are survivors, but I survived less, and so make up for it with survivor's guilt. Phin runs off into the sunset and I stay with our mother, Early, as she winds over and over this world, tying the ribbons of the road together in bows around us, and somehow, Phin finds us again and rides high on life just to spite the darkest night of his life.

Some nights, boys can't forget. Not when they steal your dignity. Some nights, I guess, stick with you and behind your eyes they're all you can ever see. That moment becomes a border: Before and After. On both sides of that divide, we were just looking for a place to sleep and somwhere to call home. Now, though, I know that I've always been home, sitting still or running fast, watching the scenery go by in a blurr. I just took the long route around to figure that out and on the way I lost and gained more than most people see in a good, long lifetime. But that's the way it goes.

I think, often, that the idea of "ethics" becomes lost in the midst of conflict. All my life, I have considered myself an ethical person. As I have grown older, I have found myself questioning if I ever really knew what "ethical" meant, or what having morals means. When the nameless, faceless soldier on the television becomes the civilian that you love, who has done all he could for his country and himself--because there is no way out--when he hates himself for shooting a gun and feeling pleasure when the enemy dies, what definition of morality can be given? To whom can "ethical" be ascribed?

From December 12

Two years ago today, at about this time, I learned what it was like to have a life ripped out from under me, what it was to know that happiness and love are illusions and that belief in either is the most foolish thing anyone could ever hold. It took almost two years to move from pitying myself because I couldn't believe my best friends had actually left me for both of those things. Now, I am as healed as I will ever be but I am changed. The walls I had built around myself and that were destroyed, never came back. Instead, steel grew in me, infiltrated me. I am a realist but I still hope.

My life is a sea of motion and I ride it. Outside, I make my own way, I race against time because I know that "we all owe death a life", and that "to be born again, first you have to die". That's some good old Salman Rushdie. That's some good old truth. I like it, because there's hardly any of it.

One day, someone accused me of wanting to save the world. I would love to save the world but I'm not an idiot. No one can save the world. No one's "got the whole world in his hands". I know that nobody changes, no one can change anyone else, and to think otherwise is foolish. I can't save anyone, including myself. I do know, though, that I can't sit back ad do nothing while I watch the human race blow itself to hell. One at a time. I will try to instill respect, rationality, acceptance in. I am not too optimistic. But I have to try.

I will spend my life trying. I will die trying because I know that the civilian becomes the soldier and the soldier, often, cannot understand himself as a pawn and cannot live with himself. In other clothes, the soldier we view as merely collateral is the civilian we mourn. There is no difference. Both deaths, on all sides, are just as tragic. Both are human deaths no matter how "wrong" or "right", how brainwashed or aware.

Because I'm me, I look everywhere, so I have to borrow this: "there's a cross for everyone and there's a cross for me". Amazing Grace. Am I running away from my own pain by focusing on that of the world? No. I have been in pain enough and I will continue to be. So will the world. The problem is, many people are incapable of pain: killing is a hobby. Pain signifies the humane within the human. If you can't feel pain, essentially, beneath the post traumatic stress, then there's a real problem. I swear I'm not a sadist or a masochist, but my goal is to make sure that if pain is warranted, it is capable of being felt. My goal is to make the human race, in very small doses, humane. Perhaps, the virus will spread.

How many times have I been in the same place: where I don't know where I am and even less where I'm going? All I know is that everyone is slipping away, either into the grave or into time.