
I wake like a slab, like a musical note covered in rain, almost aware that the pause is a chair where I sit and imagine being other than a man. I cannot escort any more sighs, they glide alone, solitary, rootless, like planets around a distant star. But it is day, and I drink its cave. I sit staring at the wall and feeling like leaping into a pure confident fire. But time is a rock and I cannot conceive its opposite. Should I return to the mad pillow, to the deaf simplicity of sleep? The anticipation of more tomorrows, of new memories opening up like meadows, is not enough. I am fragile, perishable, disconnected like the multitude of particles that make up smoke. I need to disperse slyly as a faint perfume, to be carried away by the slightest wind. I dream and rest from meaning. The earth recedes, and I return to the lucid extinction of sleep.