LIFE: A BEGINNER'S MANUAL

I am always writing, every moment, if only in my head.  "Only?"  Some of my best work is done there.  My mind is a vast, echoing hall, and in it, a small, richly furnished room, cozy, but nowhere to sit down...restless...unsettled, always somewhere the sound of laughter, shake-your-head amused laughter.

I have a lot to say, and mostly to myself.

The positives of living a long time: you're alive.  The good thing about youth: time has no end.  It tapers away into infinity, a place you will get to in good time.  "Don't be impatient, Rose; don't wish your life away."  In short, there is no death.

Somewhere around 80, I think, I began to feel as though I might be old, or getting old, and therefore my life was discrete; it would end; I would die.  I planned to be around as long as possible, but realized de novo that it wasn't up to me entirely, and that, like Lisa, like everybody, when my time was up, I wouldn't be here any more.  That, I think, is the hardest thing about life to believe.  The second hardest must be that a thing that grows from nothing at all, a squirt of semen in your belly, will emerge in due time, never mind the racket of its coming, as a tiny human being!  That is too ridiculous to believe!

A corollary ridiculous idea: that I was such a tiny sprout, that you, that any of us were.  That must be some kind of conspiratorial joke played on us by doctors or pill companies, who themselves can't really explain or imagine where we come from or how we get here.

This is a piece of time, and there must be other pieces, and I hope there is a piece where Lisa is, and my mother, and everyone whom I ever loved or was good to me, and I can inhabit that when I come there...as they do, and did.  That is all that keeps me from being afraid of dying, and sometimes even wanting to get there.  But not really, because there is still this earth piece of time with people I love who love me, and, of course, Daisy, my dog.

So I will stay here as long as I comfortably can.

Or that's my intention.

See, I am writing and writing and writing.