TEMPLE HQ

THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!

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12-2-2021

The unshakable feeling that something foundational was lost.

I remember looking over the precipice in that early age when the afternoon sun was setting the colors of defeat over the hometown’s narrow market street, an orange dying light I knew I wouldn’t see again until the dawn of my old age. The color of the sunset as Alzheimer’s sets in a decade before symptoms, the color of the sunset of a funeral fast approaching, the color of the sunset settling into nights that last decades - the color of saying goodbye, the color of loss, of the self, of others, the last colors before it all blinks out into darkness. I remember standing on the edge of a cliff knowing when the sky darkened I would have no choice but before God, before the gathering storm, before the dark stars above, before the abyssal cosmos stretching out beyond - I remember when the grass turned the color of stone and the hands from behind made it impossible to say and I held my nose and plugged by eyes and lept into the frozen water, last glimpses of what I lost forever, that foundation upon the cliff, what I left behind, gliding, falling, sinking terminally into the cold water.

I awoke today on the deck of my sloop, open at sea, my own little Slocum-hell ready in searing and loneliness for me. I awoke today to the same companions, Poseidon and the mystery-women who accompany me, I awoke today to the water I once dove into, land distant from me, wind and water the only things real anymore.