Half The Time

(fiction notes)

... half the time i don’t know whether to cry because it is so beautiful, so bittersweet that life is short, that it is so often wasted if not by your own profligate self then by someone who feels the necessity to take something from you. a piece of your birthright, something he clearly regards as precious and valuable else he would not bother to steal, now, would he.

... or because it is so painful. painful to be old, aware there are no second lives ahead of me, no second youths where i might enjoy a normal marriage with a normal person, any normal happiness of home life. no. that opportunity was stolen by someone who—why is it always this way—did not, could not profit from this theft, except insofar as his delusional thinking allowed ...

... half the time, the crying doesn’t know either, the two aspects of this feeling so close, so very close, so barely divided, i wonder that any of us knows. i wonder that anyone dares really love. for to do so is to spit in the eye of mortality, yes? yes. a kind of thievery of its own, but of a redeemed sort .... redeemable in the currency of the genuine happiness that lights the human heart ...