So You Were Saying

This is mine.

This. This word. These words. They are mine. They belong to me.

Increasingly they may be the only things I can claim with any certainty. They come from me, from the mysteries of my blood, from the contents of my brain, welded together by the sparks traveling in my nerves and up and down my spine.

They are things that happen to me, and more and more now they move unbidden from my lips and fingers. I don’t know anymore what I’m thinking until I see what I say or write.

I need to breath to keep producing words, need to keep getting up and sitting up, need to keep taking a pen in my cramped fingers and confronting blank pages.

The words serve no real purpose other than to remind me that life is still happening in my head, that my brain is still seeing something that it accepts as the world, and that it is still wobbling through that world along the margins of consciousness.

It is helpless to do otherwise.

This, and only this, is all mine. That sliver of moon belongs to the thing my brain accepts as the world, as do those branches moving in the breeze and those planes dropping from the sky. And all of these other things with which I am surrounded –the books, records, photographs, and clothing– will someday belong to someone else.

But these words, they will always be mine. Only mine.