I'm back from vacation and socializing. I'm done with that. Forever. Maybe.

Time to get back to work!

When I think of repetitive things in the world, I remember being a child on a see-saw titling up and down. I see a white mouse running in a silver wheel. I look at the moon twirling 'round and 'round the Earth. I realize my eyes are blinking. Now. Again. Again.

It's the sun in my hands. You can see the light glowing between my fingers, can't you? I can't let you look because it would hurt you if I did, and that's not what I want to do with the sun. I honestly don't know why I have it. I have no idea if there is even anything important I need to ever do with it. I just have it, and I can use it. But I don't because I only want to use something so beautiful and wonderful and brilliant for something that would help the world, to use it to do something good, but I have nothing good to do. Even with an object as wonderful as this, there is nothing to do to really help this world.

I hold out my arm and stare at the bone. It shines spotless, white, cleaner than I thought it would be, parked among the red coral reef. The skin falls away, unravels from both hands and arms. The flesh, muscle, veins, arteries, fat, and everything else inside piles on the ground. My bones are all exposed now. But I don't feel as if I ever had any flesh at all that was lost. It feels the same as it did before, even though I know it didn't. Automatic amnesia. And now the bones were always a soft gray, and now the flesh is back, and it has never changed. But yesterday I would have disagreed.

Someday maybe the bones will be bleached clean and I'll remember again how it feels to be pristine, the way I forget my teeth used to be whiter before the coffee and tea stains, after the dentist scrubs them back to their original state, sands off the grime of years of living and chewing. And again I will be afraid to wrap my hands around the mug when these teeth feel so smooth and pure until I forget and take a sip when I'm not looking. And then gray teeth that were always gray, and it seems to make no difference.

My foot relaxes on the pedal. My car is drifting across a black tar ocean. It floats by the buoys of bobbing streetlights and passing sharks of other cars. My vehicle is a piece of driftwood rocking on the sea, rocking me to sleep. The wheel has lost my grip and takes my gentle forehead in its stead. A current comes too strong and we tumble together under the waves, bubbling down, down into black depths. Before I sleep I see the twinkling lights of blue; flickering fish that swish their tails at me as I come rest on the ocean floor, and I feel my hair rise out in the water like a field of seaweed.