and i felt the sun on my face this morning, as though feeling it for the first time. it reached out its fingers all red-hot and tried to pry my skin from my bones but it could not. it could not because i did not let it. and i did not let it because i was strong, and then i was stronger still. and my breath came out in front of me so clear and so clean and so new, and i saw the world and its inhabitants through the heightened lens of my own vitality, as my creations. because now i can live without thinking about being a body. i just have one like everyone has just one. i have one like everyone has one, like a dream like everyone has a dream. soon this too will slip away like the white barks off the birch trees. nothing i could do or could have done would have gotten rid of it. no amount of skin sloughing off with thousand-dollar mud or cleansing yogi breath chased head to tail back to head. nothing i did nothing i could have done, no conversations with friends no candlelight dinner, no adrenaline under waterfall rush, all it took was this -
this right here. no blazing glory, less a fight in the mud, less shadow punches with phantom limb.