Fictuals

    I miss believing the things that I read.
    I miss the music I used to experience without even realizing it.
    When I was a kid, I used to randomly turn any combination of words or phrases into a little song, and I would sing it to myself in my head, and sometimes even out loud.
    I have not experienced that kind of pure playfulness with music and words for a long time.  Even in high school, as I walked to my next class after Orchestra, the music we had played that day would continue in my head, and I even remember one occasion on which I spontaneously created in my head, as I walked the crowded halls, an original piece of music.  It was bright and energetic, as I was, too, back then.
    I have not been bright and energetic for a long time.
    Nonetheless, I have not come here to this page today to write an ode to rejection, as well I could, nor to reflect on how I am truly a shadow of my former self.
    No.  I am here to reek of hope like onions for a world that stinks, itself, of too-misplaced affections.
    I am here as bitter medicine the world must swallow lest it die.
    And yet I speak not to the world entire, but only to a fraction of its whole.  I have no advice for the wind;  Nothing I can say would help it blow more surely from the North.
    Nor do I bring a message to our refined and feathered friends: the bees and those they visit can learn nothing from me but the desperation of that which they are not.
    Indeed, the globe itself continues spinning, no matter whether you continue reading, no matter whether this next period is really the end....
    See?  I put an end to that sentence, but I can only stop the spinning of that sentence, and others like it, because I'm the one who started writing them.
    Like a pastor baptizing his spiritual children, I capitalized each of their first letters.
    But I am not the writer of the world.  The unseen letter at the beginning of the longest sentence of them all is one I did not capitalize.
    I'm just stuck somewhere in the middle of it all, punching my imitatory phrases in the percussion of movable type (mostly parenthetical phrases, even by my own estimation), while something whose beauty I manage to appreciate without understanding whishes by me like the sweet scent of a bean-patch on the wireless-connection breeze.