There are days when I feel just absolutely horrible, and I don't know why.

Sometimes I think

that I'd rather let the world burn to the ground than see the most beloved of our loved ones become broken people.

But then there's very little difference between the two.

sometimes I think of the universe as our common mother and I think of us as living the blessed lives of children who will never once have to leave their mother's embrace

When she leaves, it's like the sun was snuffed out

From the P St. corner, if you look south down 14th st at a certain time of day, you could imagine yourself in one of the nicer busy suburbs of Cairo, maybe Heliopolis or Nasr City.

People smell funny. One girl smelled like grape flavored chewing gum—the footlong stuff, specifically. An older guy smelled faintly of top ramen packets—the oriental flavor, specifically.

I like downcast smiles on girls who don’t realize how pretty they are.

I like the first leaf to fall, the one who exchanges her summer attire for autumn colors with unfashionable haste and then leaps off her branch laughing, twirling, descending with an unconscious grace---it will be weeks before any of her siblings join her.

A Parable

In the dying days of the world, a man set out to make his place, seeking in the ways of trade or craft a noble pursuit equal to the nobility of man. But in his hometown he found none, for all was ignorance and complacency there, so he left the town by well-traveled roads laid in straight lines across the land until at last he came to a university.
At the university he found knowledge and information enough to encompass existence and even dare surpass it. The arched hallways, the broad stone plazas, the lofty towers rang with the grand declarations of students and professors alike, and the man learned from them the shape and form of the blight of the world, but not its cure, nor its end, for the blight was seeded in the core of all humankind, and eventually he came to see that knowledge devoured knowledge, that the mind too was slave to whim and caprice and alone could never undo the dark knot in the soul of the world.
The man left the university, traveling far by narrow paths and restless ways until he came to a foreign land wherein there dwelled a kind hearted people, and they welcomed him and drew him into their midst and for awhile put his mind at rest. But the land was beset with war and tyrants, and when they learned where he had come from, they shouted, Go back! Go back and save us if you truly love us, for the war upon us and the tyrants against us are the making of your very own country.
So the man left the foreign land and returned to his own even heavier of heart, and for awhile he drifted between different jobs and tiny rooms, and in his dreams he would see in a pleasant meadow the faces of his wife and children calling to him, and he would chase after them until he saw that the ground he stood on was barren beyond repair, and that they beckoned to him from across an impossible divide.
Years later, but still in the prime of his life, the man was passing through a mountain range when he came across a dead hawk in a glen of oak and fir. The man paused to contemplate the golden haired hawk, crumpled over a shattered wing. Its breast was pierced through with a bullet hole, but its eyes yet gleamed fiercely in the dusty light which slanted through the oak and fir. Suddenly a strange grief overtook the man, from where he did not know, and he buried the hawk in a shallow grave, mourning for a thing that unnamed and unknown had passed from out of creation when the idea of humankind was first conceived in its nightmarish womb.
The man made a lonely home of that glen and those mountains, never again venturing to the cities or towns below. Instead he passed his days watching banks of fog and clouds crawl over the landscape like shapeless monsters of forgetfulness and undoing come to return everything to the nothingness from which it sprang; and he lived ever thus, awaiting the day that he should break, or that the world should break before him.