God, do I love coffee, my one window beside this desk, and the quiet of my apartment. Thankfully, there’s always a way to comfort yourself.

Even the prisoner in the dungeon of his own heart comforts himself with thoughts of sunlight, his children, an anonymous friend he holds the hand of and walks down the road with, with no destination in sight, and he’ll never need one.

The therapist in me tells me you’re on the path of the mystic who seeks to be intimate with his God, and I tell him no I’m on the path of the blindly optimistic, fool poet who’s trying to love an unconditionally regarding part of himself he knows he will never find, to which my inner therapist says, yeah, that’s God.

But he doesn’t know what I know, which is that to call a thing anything is to get rid of it, or so I like to tell myself when I don’t want to think about how everything dies.

Let me say it again just so I can hear it. Everything dies. But there’s nothing that says you must feel bad about that.

In the 48 years I’ve been wherever here is I think about all the times a child or adult leaned against me and found a moment of safety, literally and figuratively. I’d be the worst kind of liar if I didn’t say that as much as it’s sucked to high flipping heaven, I’ve lived a blessed life.

Look, it’s me deciding I never had anything useful to give so that I start the long short journey back to the miracle of being enough for countless lifetimes.

Like selfishness or age has anything to do with it, I mean, I’m still trying to see through myself for that longing only a motherless child knows, for that way to be loved without being loved, still waiting for a moment today where I can prove once and for all that I’m a thing worth missing.