You.

You will collect many many lives. & you will live them all. & you will wear out many pants. & skirts & shirts & minds. & you will one day find yourself lost in a wood. & you will laugh about this strange wood, with its wildly bent trees, curling branches which bear no resemblance to your home trees. Even their leaves will be refreshing to look at. & you will sleep in the beds of weird people, wondering what they wonder about, how they see the world, where their minds’ eyes go, what doctrines they have renounced. Imagine how many times you will see yourself, and in what mirrors! Watching your face change & change. & you will sleep many nights listening to the sound of a train. Many trains, planes & deserts without end. & sometime you might find yourself stuck without a car, or money, or phone. Perhaps by a roadside. Perhaps on a far pristine beach. Or on the deck of a ship, at sea for days. You will reflect on the magic of all you have seen, all you have yet to see, all you have yet to know. You will wear out many thoughts, rely on many friends, read the treatises of many night skies, & glittering stories in the pavement of many cities. You will smile at the faces of children whose languages you cannot understand, in parks & on streets with signs you cannot read. You will love & leave countless jobs, pour your whole soul into great, shaping causes. & you will meet the ghosts of people who made you who you are. Or--perhaps more accurately--you will visit the ghosts of your oncenesses. Then, again, you will find incongruent objects & instruments in the drawers & houses of new friends & new lovers, hold them to your ear or eye & listen to their new music, however dissonant. Your youth will last a very long time. You will marvel at the mystery of new lovers’ bodies, & the mystery of your own body made new. This is all as it should be. You will taste the fruits of a hundred countries, distilled into a hundred liquors. They will warm you. You will wonder about your ghosts: Who have they become? & what wor(l)ds? At times, all of this will feel as if you are grasping after air, or after a morning mist. At times it will feel like you know something. Something true & concrete. You will know things. Over & over you will make yourself new, feel the new shiver of a new love, a new range, someone you can learn with. All of this is an again-&-again thing. The landing lights of a thousand airports. The distinct smell of a thousand rains. Meals of a million worlds. Moments of cold stillness & the fear of death. & moments of ecstatic whirling light. Desires met, or perhaps not. Wishes made & unmade. Decade after decade you will extend your hand or open your arms to worried friends. They will do the same. Again & again you will do this. & frequently, one ghost in particular will also think on you. Over & over you will both wonder. Your pasts will be a blur, a mosaic, a retinue of haunted groves, & a tessellation of crowded selves. Dance your present & your séance. & I will dance mine. & what then?