In this morning, I was accompanied by the sight of two cardinals cycling the air, like blushed-red in aerial view, and the sound of gravity at work, with thickets of snow splitting apart, dropping from the shingles as the sunlight occasionally peaked through cloud coverage.

Virginia Woolf mused the advantageous solitude, in which “the range of experience seems limitless.” I was in my room, burning moments in the quietness, breathing in match-struck, knock-off cowboy killers that I had rolled with my own hands. Between the puffs of smoke, I was furiously note-taking and nail-biting, which fittingly exuded the condition of being caught in another transition. I kept scribbling in these applications of Self with liquid and paper, with statements such as “I drew my own blood through metaphor—to ensure the commitment of handing myself over—to everything far and farther beyond me.—Take me,—in all the entirety.”

These colder seasons hand us over to vulnerability—I mind-hopped from Woolf to Douglas Hofstadter, who inferred that “minds could be mapped onto each other” with symbolic isomorphisms, signifying the chorality of a conjoined existence. The magnitude of two becoming one is what inspired his hypothesis—it was a concept that bypassed all physicality and entered a realm only meant to be guessed at, and never solved. For as long as I can remember, I have always attempted to understand these things to some degree, and after rediscovering Hofstadter’s concept, I had wondered if I was “spiritually braided into her—and her into me.”

The comforts that can be found in diligently theorized notions are too great to go overlooked. The power within the phrase, “what if?”, can induce misery or an idealistic kind of hope. It is a phrase that obstructs anything less than emotional extremities, which is something as familiar as reacting to my own name. But I arrive at these extremities with a stirring suspicion, a factor of indecision that questions whether I should be mentally conditioned on one side or the other, because “an idealistic writer with a tendency to think wishfully—is like a child—running about with scissors;—their chances of preventable injury—rammed into the ground.”

And then, I started thinking about the soil, the padding of Earth trekked above with the “out of sight” below. Now, it was absorbing December rainfall, as my flesh took shelter from the elements and not from the plague of contemplation, “and how could I act out any conviction—that I have officiated the burial—of all things that held myself away from everyone come near—from all things that held me under?”

I looked down at my chest and felt that organ stubbornly beating on, while each collection of grey flakes, miniature mountainous, in the ceramic bowl represented each thought racing through me, but I attempted to pass no judgment onto myself—Nietzsche pronounced that “you have your way, I have my way—As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” The commonality all humankind is Purpose, and it is found through various ways of living—blunt-rolling, bed-warming, bantering train rides through Chicago, bending for a bad habit, breaking apart and relearning a name in the same skin, bursting into life through the words of dead authors and cheering those among the living who are capable of the same reactionary. And still, I must numb certain pains, But oh, how celebratory! The ways in which I come into myself,

“with Modus Vivendi, Tempests non-Bypassed—being formative to my depths—I revel inside the grand scheme—I recite for those in and out of my time, for I am only a mere participant—in the Cosmic chance—in all its entirety,—take me, wholly.”