por una cabeza

Since I downloaded the crappy ringtone version last night while unable to sleep, that lovely overplayed Gardel tango has been spinning through my head.

It's eight minutes to 5 am now, and I'm still not asleep. I may have passed out for a couple minutes and then sprung awake at the shock of it. During the worst days of my recovery, I would sleep up to fourteen hours and remain in bed far longer, cuddling Snuggles and contemplating emptiness. Why am I now huddled at the other extreme?

For some reason, I am reminded of Wallace Stevens' "Auroras of Autumn":

He opens the door of his house
On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

concrete_fem blogged "for the past two months i've been beating myself up over the loss of one friendship, instead of loving myself harder for all that i have survived." I'd never seen myself that way before. Can I love myself like that? Do I deserve to?

"here goes the countdown: 20 hours & 18 pages to go." Brave woman. I think I've deliberately forgotten what it was like to crouch at that starting line, rocking on my heels, not really believing I'd make it to the end in time. And then the sun would rise on fifteen pages of intense elaboration on an idea plucked hastily out of the thought-heavy Yale air. The last three pages were always the hardest, written on a stale-coffee-driven fragile film of awareness... or the easiest, if the page count included the bibliography.

The candle I lit for him just went out. I hope he isn't shaking and sweating and racked by everything else that accompanies withdrawal. I don't know what nicotine addiction is like, but I know something about convulsions. Call it electrolyte withdrawal: I didn't eat for almost a week during a serious case of food poisoning, and the doctors thought I had developed epilepsy. But for your body to fight you for a substance that's harmful to it... that's frightening.

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.
The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,
A darkness gathers though it does not fall
　
And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.
The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.
He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,
　
With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps
And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,
The color of ice and fire and solitude.

One minute to 5 am.