through the garden ran a trail of old millstones dug deeply into the soil and carefully placed to look as enchanted and unmolested a thing of nature as the very pinkening sky above. the old man with the worn velvet top hat ran quickly towards a thatch roofed house whose smoke stack was billowing blue smoke whale puffs swimming ever upward. Always upward. As he ran, he left a trail of doggeared, yellowing books in his wake. Strewn upon the glistening millstones, they looked like autumn leaves dropped by an invisible and ever branching tree. Everything about the strange, gnomish man seemed to materialize as he went on his way. Instead of turning raw materials into ideas, everything for this backwards man, went in thin air and came out something of substance. His jovial whistling fell upon the ground under gravity's pull as a filled composition book illustrated by notes of every degree. His wild gesticulating painted the pinkening sky with dazzling abstractions. As I followed him I looked upon the fallen, aged titles, everything was there, all knowledge neglected and abused, folded and faded, looked through instead of into. And it horrified me. The desire of humans is inexhaustable. No. Knowledge isn't enough. We aren't content to be like gods, to know good and evil. We want not only the tree of knowledge, but the tree of Life too. And happening upon either, we would simply shred it, bleach it white and clean, count its rings, eat its fruit, and print our disappointment on its very being. Because nothing satisfies consciousness. G-d breathed his own sigh of restlessness and discontent into our nostrils after he fashioned so meticulously our bodies and our world. Is not the desire of children to destroy their perfectly fashioned sand castles divine? If so our legacy is to wiggle and writhe uncomfortably through our mortality passing on a divine restlessness to a forever writhing procession of worlds. G-d has no image because forms are doomed to perfection and decay, to reaching a height and then descending, to construction and destruction. And we, confined to an existence as form, would be resisting the divine desire to construct and destroy, if we were to believe in something that reaches a point of completion. That would be the ultimate idolatry. The ultimate sin. That would be becoming a god, which for some reason is the most detestable thing to G-d; to be imitated; to be strived for; to be desired to be replaced. And as I stared at the millstones I wondered: was the serpent really necessary? Would we not have invented him had he not existed? Just then I awoke from that thought as the sonorous groan of a whale shattered the heavens like thunder, and the sea began to fall towards the earth. It was all falling downwards. Always downwards. And I felt another ignition within me: what goes up must come down and go up and come down again. At that moment I wondered: who was this man I was following?

At my right sat an old white envelope with my name scrawled out in my mother's handwriting. It was old paper. So old it looked like linnen. There across from me at a table. She was probably 21 or so. Blonde. Abercrombie sweatshirt. Half eaten slice of pecan pie. Her belt fastened on the side of her hip. A statement. A sideways glance. Sitting with her. Two women. Accents and overweight. Probably smokers. And next to her hip. A baby in a padded chair. Crying. She deftly screwed a bottle top on and complained about the crying. Pulled out a new razr cell phone. Stuck the bottle in the baby's mouth. After the call ended she complained more about the baby and talked to it as if to tell it: you are already ungrateful. Give the baby your fucking tit you stupid bitch. I felt myself saying it angrily. This is a plague. No contact. No touching. Desparate contact. Desparate touching. Children. Mirrors. Reminders. Little yellow notes posted. This is the world you have made clean. You have sacrilized touch. It is an indestructable idol. Give the baby your fucking tit. Because I can't feel you even if you are so close. Its always some piece of plastic or rubber. And when it doesn't work. Avoidance. Stupid Questions. Ingratitude. Somebody just touch me thats all. Is that so dangerous a request? Give me diseases. I'd rather contract them than make them up myself. The envelope rustles. The overhead fans rattle. Silence. Its listening. I can only think when its quiet. Because when I talk. Nobody really listens. Only silence. Its always listening. The whole cold empty universe is hearing us. Feeling our warmth. Circles can't be complete without what's incomplete. This neverending imperfection. Silence. My wadded napkin looks like linnen. I feel my mother's handwriting. Dissolving every moment. Into thin air. Slowly.    

Ten at night. No pathway is the same twice and silence is the greatest listener. One person who can't stand silence can't listen either. Tonight the crows were crowding the stoplights crying out their terrible cries in a chorus of black laughter. I noticed the ceiling fan at the diner and felt immediately that I lack the sense of being at home everywhere I had when I was a child. But tonight I was. A muslim couple walked into the diner and I immediately felt...what is for them here? As I  drove home I wondered if they were out having a last supper the night before they gave up on the whole wide world for the sake of their two little infinite souls. Should I have sat down and talked to them? Should I have a conversation with what terrifies me? Are my fears reasonable? Maybe terror is a desparation of sorts. A searching for a reason not to hate and not to feel completely hopeless. Maybe what threatens to destroy us is really begging for us to give it a reason not to. But that is something nobody can give I suppose. It has to be obtained by each one alone. A sense of what it is to be human can not be behaved or acted perhaps. So if tommorrow they do destroy themselves and others, I suppose I am guilty of not even trying to give them a reason to see that I am worth keeping. And I guess I would be guilty for everything else that happened. Am I crazy?