Within some experiences I am “there,” within others, I am “not there.” In the latter sort, it is either anxiety-laden hyper-awareness or sardonic dissociation from minutia-made-material. In the former, it is effortlessness, freedom, gliding bones through sea, the waves pushing me down its throat and breathing me back out, moistened and changed. In both forms of existence I find myself; this is not something to reconcile, but to accept. I have realized myself as one contradiction—a noose round the neck of a flower, a gardener of thistle and thorn. The blue sky stretches across the horizon, and my mind removes itself to a distant branch. I find myself both here and not here. This space between body and mind is the closest I have to freedom. And so I add a layer to myself, or uncover one. And this, always, is where I find purity, where I comprehend the contradiction, where I taste the essence of that which I cannot otherwise know.