On Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells Approaching

By then, of course, they’d done plenty in the name of recklessness — their word as well, though incorrect, for wilderness. Ah, scutchweed, rushlightitude, if not, why not, strowbegone, nor sheep, fa la, shall graze. The way, incredibly, for most it’s still enough to have noticed a similar weather pattern between regret and the windy plains of remorse, like that must make them the same, or should, or at least no more different than a fetish for being eaten alive and whole is, apparently, from the desire to leave loneliness behind forever — a reasonable desire, I suppose, but in the end a useless one, since actual loneliness isn’t leavable: love distracts from loneliness, it doesn’t crowd it from view    ...    some could almost see this, eventually; others chose not to. Some — the luckiest — arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where to be understood entirely stops being the main thing, or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl before them, one after the other, each a seemingly vast underworld of damage they didn’t have to talk about, not anymore, they agreed it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was was their own.