Who is trying too hard to convince herself?

That there is a message at all is enough. Just consider how we are, our ears turned to each other, to the march of history, to the genome, to the edges of mathematics, to music and the arts, to the very echo of the cosmos, for a message. Any.

We think the message is revealed to us, but it is the opposite, we are revealed before the message. The symbols I have been straining over, have laid me bare.

And as for the message humanity hopes for, whether or not there is any divine author to go with it, we can be sure the gods we have imagined are apparitions of a collective mind, inventions. It is madness to think the God we contemplate could be confined within our contemplation–we cannot even visualize a four-dimensional solid or an imaginary number. Even in the ancient stories, it is said the glimpse of Him would make one blind. And still we are naked before this drawing of ours, this As-If-It-Were-God, literally and emotionally, as revealed as in a painting or a song.

So how frightened are we, and what exactly of, that the moment we turn from the work of art or from the notion of the divine, to face each other, we immediately conceal and repress ourselves?

I hope I never do manage to decipher this message I found, waiting in this bottle someone once left it in. There is no limitlessness without mystery.

Being around people with a high sense of entitlement starts out fun, but soon you notice that they also feel entitled to you.

I want to live in the places of our mind. I want a free ride on the things that we aspire to. Haven’t I felt empathy for the unfortunate, predicted the events of the planet, conceived of great inventions and works of art that I would accomplish, if only I had the time? I’ve seen us, too, in my mind. We are in perpetual amazement with each other, honest without the slightest loss of mystery, somehow at the top of our arcs, with all the time to dazzle the world, and all the time to idle like a picnic with each other.

What is this awful place where we actually live, this city named for a better one, one that is a legend, and is mostly a myth? Are we, collectively, so dull that we cannot even name a river? Maybe you and I could never be together, we would try to escape but not quite manage, we would go to the end of the world, and still we’d be there, mechanical in our language, and like the actuaries or adjusters of romance, systematically disproving the best that we’d imagined, systematically hedging against the worst.

When I was a child, I hoped that later, ten or twenty years later, I would not know the difference between the things I had experienced, the things I had dreamed, and the things I had imagined.

Have you ever felt like you hesitated when you needed to be rash?

Have you ever felt some way that was difficult to manage?

Do you know anyone who lives as though always wishing?

They say a fog came one summer and lasted ninety days. When it lifted, it took the colours from our irises, revealed a city that had been repainted grey and chipped. No one was left who was in love, but every debt was forgiven.

I took the ferry to Halifax once and the trip stole my memory. As I stood out on the deck and felt the spray cold on my face it felt like hands were reaching up out of the frigid choppy waters to unravel me like thread, leaving me salty and clear. Absolved.

Let us destroy the Martello Tower. Destroy it again and watch them build it back every year, growing more determined to catch us. Growing craftier, subtler, causing all our friendships to falter under the weight of mistrust and betrayals, until only you and I are left. We both know we are too few, and too poorly equipped to keep the rebellion going. We try anyway and are caught. The prosecutor demands that we hang, one before the other. Instead we escape, and drown in the attempt, swimming from the island fortress to a land we imagine but know nothing about, except that we know it is hopelessly far away.

I know where the tunnel entrances are, beneath the Citadel and the Signal Station. They are flooded and murky and icy. They are dangerous and perfect. If you can show me something better, then I am yours.

How badly did you want it to be true? Enough to live your whole life, doubting?

Have you ever wanted to break up, but didn’t have a good enough reason? I am still fooling around with pens and working on my penmanship. But it feels good to be writing by hand, doing this without digital type. Someday it will be good and legible for you, too. I promise.