So this is your love. Oh what to do.

            You hear the hum. The distant noise. The steady throb. The tip tap. The high hat. So you close your eyes.

            You don’t get it. Don’t understand. Don’t even try to know.

            Each day something gets beaten down and destroyed. You lose a little bit of it. You scratch and you claw and you grit and you clench and you just hear the utter hush. But you keep going. That’s all you know to do.

            You see strands and make connections. You try not to duplicate. You try not to repeat. Nothing works that well anyway but if it did you’d toss it out and watch it float down the river. Then you’d start walking again hearing the sounds of your steps and trying to shuffle them in a different way.

            There is tone and style and voice and tense. In the shadows of the places nobody else ever sees or knows these things mean everything. But you keep it to yourself. Everybody only wants to study the success.

            The beauty is in the unknown, the running to a place you have no idea exists. You want to hide there and want to study it. You want to live and breathe and see and then leave. You always leave. You always move on and let go.

            It’s an opened door. It’s also a cracked window. A failed fence falling in. A roofleak.

            These ridiculous, random moments are ones you don’t want to relive. But they remain part of the journey. And the journey is, yes. And the journey is, of course. The journey is, absolutely.

            No need to repeat the obvious things right before your eyes.

            You stand at the familiar cliff and you breathe in and out. You can’t decide whether you’re Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid but the reality is both will be jumping off in just a matter of seconds.

            You’re on the run but they haven’t caught up yet.

            You’re still creating stories while they haven’t captured you.

            Your heart and soul are still free.

            And so it goes. You blink and see yourself as a bladerunner. You blink and have 30 days in November to live. You blink and are Chris Buckley on the road headed back to North Carolina with strangers at your side. Just another night and just another random set of voices urging you on.

            Will it matter a voice asks but you already know the answer.

            Will it last a voice asks but you already know the truth.

            There are chunks inside that are real and that mean something. They will last.

            You no longer wonder if you have a week or a month or a year left. You’ve left that up on the cliff above you. You’re now drifting downstream toward another destination. Laughing and shaking your head. 

            Another story.

            Dark or light. Sweet or sour.

            Or maybe all of them.

            This is your love. The thing you’ve always seemed halfway good at. The thing that’s kept you grounded and lost. The thing that’s fascinated and frustrated.

            The gift you’ve been given. For 2,186 days.

            MAKE THEM COUNT the voice says.

            MAKE THEM MATTER it continues.

            Somedays, you know you do.

            Somedays.

            And there will be more. Hopefully many more.