If I keep my promise
If I carry your hope when you cannot hope
If I speak the gentle words of comfort when your lips are dry and parched,
If I make a quiet and sweet world for your escape when the world outside seems too cold
or too loud, or too wild
If I give you the sky and all the space of the prairies to dance, and run, and ride
Then, my dear, we will never fade,
or lose our luster.
If you want it, love, a life unimaginable.

For L.

There is nothing in the intricate design of the eye that tells us how we are able not only to see the world, but to look back upon it.
Is there a magical element yet unknown, somewhere deep in the vitreous humor, or hidden within the optic nerve that burns with the purpose to seek out beauty in the world?
To capture it in our gaze, to own it for a rich moment or two.
Is there some electrical impulse within this blinking vessel
that projects our delight upon the object of our affection?
We know we love, and yet how can this be so? It does not exist anywhere in our anatomy.
We know that we would risk everything for that enduring answer, seen radiating from another's eyes,
and yet, how can we grasp it and hold it tight, this invisible thread?

Where, in the gray matter and electrical streams and storms of our mind, lies our imagination?
A game of telephone from neuron to neuron sends the fleeting thought
that behind our closet door there may be another world,
where a nautilus is king, and great whales swim the cosmos, feeding on the tails of comets.
But only for a moment do we think, perhaps it is so.
Until we open the solid door, and what we believe,
because we must,
shows us the simple fact of a tidy linen closet.
We believe it, because we must.
For there is nothing in our marvelous jellyfish of a brain that tells us that the world can be
anything
and everything
we want it to be.  
And with that, the World, and all the other worlds
here, there, and in between,
smile at us,
the fleeting shimmer of light in an endless sea.

The stab of pain, all shock and neon lights,
then the bright bone white blinding center of it.
Drowning out thought and time.
This skip of heart beat and ripple of adrenaline,
is over in a matter of seconds,
and still the breath catches in the lungs, jaws clench, the muscles tense in anticipation of
another wave of arching agony.  
As the electrical storm goes quiet for a moment, the relief is like a cool  shot of morphine.
The ecstasy of being without it, though it is fleeting, is the reminder of life, of life force.  
And then, a fog of amnesia.
The dull throbbing sets in again, to give way to another spasm, a vice grip at my temples.
When this night, and this episode come to a close, I will forget how truly alive I felt in this moment of white hot misery.