“And you can't know it, because to know it is to be it, and to be it is to not be you.”

“Was that—did she just grin at me? To me? A moment of stillness in this moment of pause. Without speaking, we let our gazes wander slow, groping to confirm relief in the other. There's a subdued excitement for the oncoming sharing of whatever's waiting for us behind that heavy iron door, exclusive—two solitary embers, isolated in their separate pits, far away but fanned by the same wind, the same night, alone with the night, their respective camps all gone to sleep, flaring softly cradled calling, out against the great dark backdrop of the great unknown.”

“He lies there listening to it, absorbing this sense of his own quiet drone transmuted into something of certain substance, something large, magnificent and grand—no longer him, no, but something bursting from him, leaving his split carcass behind as a monument to its source, its host, its feeding ground.”

“Preferring the nausea of the path to its fated and certain ending.”

“It's nice to be able to do things for other people, isn't it?That's why it's fun to talk in the third person sometimes.”

“But finally, once in an age, there is a blink. And in that blink, you can be. And in that blink, I can be.”

“How nice would it be to just drop from the tree, fall from forking branches a ripened fruit thudding your weight to earth without distraction, without option—thrust to ground under gravity's current to be gathered up and eaten or left there to decay and deposit that seed from the core of your being into the little plot of your death, lush ring of your composted fertilizing flesh.”

“And you can't know it, because to know it is to be it, and to be it is to not be you.”

“Let's ignore all that back and front matter and just stick to emergences, cross-sections, to what's right in front of us in the divide where all-things has come to gather and to stay though hidden yet behind its mask, which has got it looking so deliciously comprehensively like so many things-distinct.”

“Ego like bile over taste buds. Get it out or hold it in. It's the suspension will drive you nuts, churn your gut.”

“If you can't stomach an ending, don't begin.”