Never odd or even

It came to me in a dream. The title, plot, characters. The whole thing clear and bright and played out backwards over and over again vivid enough to wake me and important enough that I rose in the night to write it down. The title is Never Odd or Even. The author's name is Red Irene Rider, a pseudonym perfect for a mystery woven around the single thread of an enigmatic sentence; Raw signal slang is war. At the end of the book the reader sees upside down words filling pages still to come. He flips the book over and reads from the back, now front, a new beginning from another point of view but directly related to the story he has just finished. It explains much and leaves a beguiling sense of mystery hanging in the air, a door into summer opened in a wall where once there was nothing. This tattered thread of thought is all that I have left of the dream with which to reweave the brilliant tapestry that my mind created as I slept. The story is there. I just have to remember it. And then write it down.

A soft rain begins to fall outside. The air is still and pregnant with possibility and I am dying. I feel it in my chest where a new pain adds itself to older, more established twinges. This new arrival is not to be ignored and, because I have learned something during the long short years of my life, I write. This is my quiet place, a cyber plot in a graveyard not yet filled, where I come to build my version of Helen's Raft whenever the mood strikes me. The pen, it is written, is a long arm from the grave. That you are here reading makes it so, don't you think? Interesting, if nothing else. You will have more time to consider it. I, on the other hand, do not. Luckily, I don't need more time, at least not for consideration. I know, at last, what my world is made of. The legends and myths, tragedy and mirth, vibrant love, sadness and unutterable joy that is and has been my life all exist here in my mind and through it all runs a song. I could not be happier as I try to capture a tiny fraction of it and I challenge you to understand, as I do, that dying does not matter. We are not bodies with souls. We are souls with bodies.

A very good friend of mine who should have been an author himself and may yet be if I have my way once wrote that when we die we find ourselves, "alone on an island." This single sentence should be immortalized for it's uncanny accuracy if not for it's existence among thousands of others in a long first novel or for having lived in my memory for all these years only to surface on this sultry night to be placed again on paper. I am alone on that island and getting lonelier. This statement is not a plea for comfort and sympathy, but an acknowledgement that our lives are ineffable and, like the dream that caused me to rise and write, cannot be captured by words. That having been said, I am now free to walk among the fireflies and try.

I am immersed in time's river and being carried ever closer to the source. 

Life is a blessing. 

Love continues unabated.

The stories will come.