E tenebris

Some day last week--Thursday? Friday?--I was walking home from work and doing what I've been doing too much of lately, obsessing about the vagaries of the future. Specifically, worrying myself about monshu. Naturally, at the same time that I was doing it, I was trying to stop myself from doing it. First I tried my usual tack, which is to remind myself to be in the moment. At the present moment, monshu is still here. He will be there when I get home. Someday, I will come home to an empty house, but not today. And so on.

But then I had a newer, more disturbing thought. And that was that Fate is an asshole. The whole while you're focused on one big ugly thing, there's another waiting just outside your range of vision. It's like the joke about searching for your keys under the streetlamp. Very little is within that circle of light and, at any moment, something can burst in from the great outer darkness. And if you're standing there with your head down, looking at the same ugly spot, it will hit you all the harder.

Today something did rush out of the darkness. A dear friend died suddenly last night. Was he a good friend? We've hardly spent any time together lately--for no real reason, just my laziness. Now that he's dead it feels like we'd hardly spent any time together at all. I can't imagine what his wife is going through. I should, because one day it'll be my turn.

Why isn't this damn year over yet?