Burn
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What we take for granted—that another day would come. Everyone had to know in their bones that every life hung by a thread. That the world did. But if we couldn’t pretend to count on a morning of sailing, or fishing, or a visit with someone we loved the next day, we’d go nuts, right? Right. So pretend away.
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If only for a moment he felt again, in muscle and bone, what it was to stand snug and capable in his own skin, and to wonder at the ramifying vastness of everything beyond it and the possibilities there. How his heart had opened. He thought, as he scanned the lake for movement, that the value of a life reckoned by the one living it was always determined in relation to the landscape of spirit through which that person moves. How that changes over time. So, if he was in a dark wood now, a spiritual nadir, he might be apt to believe he had wasted his life.
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No hurry when the compass is spinning. When you are rooted to earth. When living means taking a step but you have no idea toward what. You are alone under the wheeling season, and the best memories are drained by loss.
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he wondered if this was what life offered. Just this. Days of good hard work, a friend, a sense of family, a winter constellation rising late in the infinite silence of an early-spring night. Why, then, did he feel sad? A hollow ache he could not name? And why, though his belly was full and his best friend slept yards away, could he not shake it off?
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always after that, for the rest of his life, he suspected that he did not know how to properly read the emotional landscape of those around him, and that what seemed solid and eternal probably wasn’t, and that love could run very, very deep and also end.