Splendid

I wake at 2:00am and in rushes the fear. This explains the insomnia. I have been focused, determined to live today, live in today, stay in the now and be present. I promised myself that today was all I had and it should be enough, abundantly satisfying, for if I was forever focused on the future, that non-existent thing, then I miss today and what if today is my last? I squander today fretting over tomorrow and all the tomorrows. I have insomnia because sleeping surrenders the day, the now to the what if and maybes and might bes. Sleeps is the acquiescence to living for tomorrow. I give up today and all I am feeling and experiencing for a maybe. Tomorrow holds no guarantee; we may not wake and we were foolish to trust that tomorrow would come. I am angry with him for robbing me of today. His fear opened the door for the ghost of Jacob Marley, who arrives with the grievous pains and failures of my own past. The past is past, it cannot be undone or changed. If given the chance I would not redo or rewrite one word because I loved today! Today is mighty and splendid. His kiss, his face, their laughter, the blooming flower, the thunderclouds all occupy the now and to change one question mark or one turn signal may rob me of my now. I only get to now by making each and everyone of those minute and inconsequential choices that are the interstitial spaces around the births and the deaths and the losses and the achievements. But he is afraid, the past is close at his heels and by disclosing his fears he causes my own to rise from their slumber. I had put them to bed because today is a stern parent and manages such things, today knows that what is past cannot be unwritten yet the past gives me the boarding pass for this moment, this place, which I love and revel in, like a twirling child, free to laugh and cry and eat honey toast. But I know his fears, mine are not so different and those rattling chains of the ghosts of the past are often not quite ghosts but freshly killed and decomposing. That fresh past is hard to ignore, it taints and invades. It took a long time for my past to be just the past. I was loving today. But his fears make me think about my own and that gaping maw that is tomorrow. What about tomorrow? What do we do with tomorrow. It paralyzes me. I have no clue about tomorrow. I have no control over tomorrow. But I had today and if I close my eyes, I surrender. If I preoccupy my mind with all the combinations of tomorrow, mixed with all the rattlings of the past then today is gobbled up and becomes this useless, empty, banal thing. I am angry with him because I know these preoccupations, these worries about where things go. It captures me like an absence seizure; I stare into nothingness and dread. What if it’s just like the past? I don’t want the past repeated because I know that it hurt. And then, then I remember the softness and the loveliness of the past. It wasn’t all bad. How do I know this? Because I had TODAY and today is good, it is the loveliest and most beloved day because I had it with you. And this is why I don’t sleep, why I wake, because I have today. I want today. I don’t want to think about all the variables and combinations of tomorrow. The calculus of tomorrow exceeds my capacity. Today I can grasp and today may truly be all that the human heart and mind are meant to grasp. Be here. Be now. Just be. Standing here in the now, the pain of the past fades into the mists and the terror of the future is irrelevant. Why? Because I have now and its all I have. It is plenty. It is splendid.

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