Boundless.

Garett,

For every day of my life that I have spent full of passion for my words and for the fictions I craft with them there have been many others that I have spent murmuring sadly in a cold and quiet cell, looking over my desolate lot with gloomy despair. If I see myself in art, it is only because I have looked. When I work at my words, I believe in them. When I set them aside and glance over them rarely, I believe in nothing. Today, I saw the round, yellow moon through a dense web of tiny, fingering branches on a leafless tree. The lit up tips of the bare branches formed incomplete circles which spiraled infinitely away from me and up towards the full moon. I thought of you and your occasional mysticsm. You denied it most of the time, but often enough, some indication of a hidden soft spot for the infinite would brim up over the lip of your whiskey glass. When the human mind fearfully suspects its own finality, it can, by some trick of the light, perceive the divine. But mostly, the search for the infinite just sends you around in circles.

I am always searching for an infinity that I can barely feel. On a rare occasion I grasp, what I deem to be, the entirety of the human condition. I stand back and stare, in awe, at the depth there is inside me, at the simple fact that I can stand back and stare in awe. And I truly beleive that that is the entirety of the human condition. What is divine is that we can perceive divinity at all, that it is something which lives so brightly inside us. I suppose we all experience the same divinity in different ways. Anna sees it in glowing in the eyes of her child. I see it in the people who pass by me when I walk, in the way they hold their heads and in the fact that I can make them real by simply putting them into words. You, well, where do you see it? In the burning corners of the papers you wrote and then set to flame?

It is beyond me how you can understand so much about what it means to make yourself alive outside your skin, about what it means to do something more than yourself, and yet you glance fearfully to the sides whenever you have written something. As if someone might catch you actually building a life of the things inside you. But, perhaps I am less than objective? Perhaps you have so much more than I. It is true that you maintain a job; you maintain relationships with people outside of yourself. And maybe I make people so fervently because I cannot make them know me, or want to know me, in the outside world. Or maybe I choose to stay silent and hidden because I prefer to whisper some small and solid things to an indefinite audience of my own choosing. And maybe that is how I approach the infinite.

But, maybe, the infinite is only apparent in the definite. Maybe the infinite only lives in the silently setting sun, in the sound my steps make on the stairs at night. Maybe the infinite is just an illusion, just an imagined feeling, a feeling everyone has as he falls asleep beneath the stars. The sky is a pale milky blue pulsing purple at the horizon. High above me I can already see the moon, thin as tissue paper and fading from its fullness. Tonight the sky will be a brilliant wintery black and I will look up into those few stars which glow more brightly than the city lights. And I will believe that what I see is boundless.

Fernando