It does not leave entirely; it can be triggered again at any moment, by the right sequence of whispers, admixtures of fatigue, overcommitment or simply the scent of life. A turbulent system of conflicting impulses, each cycle of longing and repression incrementally eroding what little stability the construction of a self possesses… © KD.W.Heim

rather an empty seat in the audience… © KD.W.Heim

of intervals, a pause so small as to go unregistered by any instrument of time, so evanescent it slips through the hands of history, the yearning appears. Not a yearning for anything that can be owned, eaten, touched, or even named; not a hunger that can be sated by any act of consumption or communion,…

and categorized, for objects that have edges, shadows, reflections; Presence is before all of that, and after as well… © KD.W.Heim

but the mind does so anyway, racing through metaphors, similes and failed analogies, hoping that somewhere in the act of speaking, it itself might briefly become manageable; it never does… © KD.W.Heim

that bridges the moment right before words become possible and the instant immediately after memory is lost… © KD.W.Heim

stories become more complicated and rituals more elaborate to disguise it; presence remains uncorrupted, unmanipulated… © KD.W.Heim

have escaped it; the foundation of truth, the only residue that remains when all else has been stripped away, shared by all but owned by none… © KD.W.Heim

between one obligation and the next, one feels it: an ache for silence, a craving to fall in a stillness so perfect it will be amplified to thunder; plunging into the silence, swimming in it, emerging cleansed, but the longing curdles as quickly as it arrives. What remains in a day assembled almost entirely from…