01_Unexpected 02_Pressing On 03_An Ordinary Life 04_Continuity 0#_My Will To Fight -------------------- Connexions Music RCP90 Elijah's Tomb Boy Charlie -------------------- ryanro@mac.com

BORN TO BE WIRED My eyes flash open. I am still here. With a heavy sigh, I compose myself and attempt to return to sleep. It takes time, of course. Sleep is not easy. Hopes and prayers and imaginations of the future tenderly slide into my thought process. Always I remain aware that my imagination will not match up to real life. Real life is not glossy or scripted. And yet, I am inordinately more satisfied by the imperfections that come with reality. Why should I bother with living if everything occurred exactly as I would dictate? It is put aside. An hour already this night I have worked on falling asleep. And now, here I lie, forced to make yet another attempt to slip into wonderful unconsciousness. My active imagination I can deal with. I detest my mind's attempts to interfere with precious sleep by dreaming. I fall... My eyes flash open. Lucid awareness restores immediately. A vague recollection of an ethereal world tantalizes me, but no memory remains. Here I like, wide awake in the dimness of my room. The world is dark and I am alone. What purpose has my dreaming served? I am not pleased; I am not intrigued. I am irritated at being awoken---as though dreaming is the equivalent of somebody flipping my lights on and disrupting my unthinking rest. Sleep is an escape. Sleep is blissful. I lie in my bed listening to my heart beat. I fancy that I can feel its outline, as if the organ is somehow detached from the rest of my body. Almost as though I could reach inside and tear it out... I wake again. Sleep took me by surprise. Still I wake before it is time. The dreams came again. I lie awake. This time I remember. The intensity. The passion. The beauty. I felt alive---for a moment. I felt whole---for a moment. And this time, my curious dreaming has---for the moment---swathed me in warmth and love and peace and such comfort. There are moments in this life where I have been blessed by such phenomenon. The dream ends. I lie awake in my room once more, knowing I can not go back. I lie awake, alone, with only my own breathing for company. I fancy that my heart is separated from my chest cavity. My dreaming, yes, I remember it now. I detest it all the more for taunting me with images of a life that I crave but do not yet have. Turning, I place my heart beside me. It is bright, so bright...beautiful in its horrible functionality and stark biology. Perplexed, I notice a socket that somehow has escaped my attention until now. The urge to search through my box of spare parts prompts me to wake, but a tendril of thought inserts into the swirl of four or more layers of consciousness. "Stay", it says. "It will come in time. I made you to function without it for as long as necessary. You will be quite alright until the proper connection can be made. But until then, beloved, live your life. Wait without waiting. I will help you. Live, my child. Live." Despite such melancholy sadness and acute self-awareness, the beating of a heart against my chest lulls me to sleep. Almost as if my heart was... I wake. My heart is in good hands.

Get up, shake the dust from your bones, and walk.

ON LOVE: I am not qualified to write on the subject. I am, however, given to understand that I am loved. Curious.

"The measure of a man is not in how he gets knocked down to the mat... It is in how he gets up." - Battlin' Jack Murdock