It’s the fragility of everything that just makes you crazy. It’s the sense that it could all just fall apart in a few otherwise empty moments. But the fragility also holds beauty, a fractured bitter beauty you can’t ever manage to turn away from. It’s Fitzgerald’s always three o’clock, the dead darkness of winter burrowing away at your soul, searching desperately for another year’s rest. And outside you pretend, outside you patch it all together with plastic smiles and nods of the head. Inside you roar mightily, you spin the cylinders of every single year that’s passed you by, you listen for the pins to drop into place, you pace the worn empty floors of your mind, waiting waiting waiting, always waiting.

Is it all confusion? Is it all random? Or is it your own fault for believing that. For not deciding what to do and when. For not saying you won’t let anything stop you. For continuing to wait.

No, but I saw you, after all. I saw what you have accomplished. You did not give up. You did not falter. You rose above it all. Yes, you did.

For that, then, for that I am grateful.