this is a story of the spaces in-between. the page between chapters, the grey before dawn. the edge of the forest, the half-formed thought. it’s a precarious state of existence; hardly an existence at all. this is where the river is swept into the sea, where the child is no longer a child but not yet an adult. this is where the lost things are, the ones we will never know that we have forgotten. perhaps as small as a dream that fades away in the breath between conception and thought; perhaps as large as a world suspended in the tableau between one era and the next.

things such as these hover in our sights for the merest fraction of a moment before we are captured by something else bigger and better and clearer; who has time for the half-trained hero, the undefined and the nebulous? neither here nor there, these clouded things are worth less than the least of us. here you have the cleansing rain, and here you have a brilliant snow; and here is the uncrystallized sleet that splats down on the stones like rotted pears. hmm, you might remark of it. it will snow soon. the rain was cold. always defined by what it was, what it will be. never a state of being, but a state of becoming. no inherent value, but only a possibility, a question, that waits to be seen.

only, this is false.

we dance on ravelling string, each one of us suffused to the bone with the false truths we tell about ourselves and each other. you are as transient as I am, sir, and I am as transient as you. you see me through those filtered lens of yours, and I see you through such finely-calibrated eyewear. one batch of inventions is as real as the next, and all of them together paint this world in our uncertain certainty. the arctic hare is certain of the sweet subtleties between shower and sleet and snow, but to a fire ant these things are wild whimsies.

so, I propose to you, keep your armful of truths if you wish. but remember that in the gap between every once and future is a now. not for you, now, because other things are yours; but remember them. acknowledge them, these discarded things of yours that hold universes to another, these breaths in-between, as full of singularity as any striking story.