I will light a cigarette tonight, I will pour myself a drink... I will leave the door open, And bolt the heart shut... And as the cigarette unwinds its smoke, I will paint each moment as it slips away. In the frothed glass of champagne, I will see you, I will hear myself cry... Between walls frozen solid, I will greet what is written for me, I will bid farewell to feelings turned to rot, That I loved you—today I forgive myself! And when dark comes, I'll step out, Unburdened by you, lighter at last, Though you have marked me all the same, To think of you, even as you dream. Because there are souls on this earth Whom you can only love, never possess! Such is the way of things, such is fate, You move forward, but you never run again!
# Destiny We are not masters of our fate, nor captains of the soul— that Victorian lie dissolves like sugar in the monsoon rain. We are leaves caught in a current, spinning, spinning toward the sea, believing ourselves navigators of our own green descent. The thread was spun before we drew breath, measured before we learned to measure, cut at an hour we cannot fathom— by hands we'll never see. Yet we cling to the illusion of choice, weave our small rebellions, trace our fingers along the seams of a garment already sewn. Perhaps this is mercy: not knowing the pattern, building our castles of straw and song, while the storm that will scatter them waits, patient, in the wings. Or perhaps—and here the mind catches fire— perhaps the pattern itself is us: our struggling, our reaching, our refusal to surrender woven into the very cloth of what must be. In that case, destiny is not cage but dance, and we are both the dancer and the danced, the word and the speaking of it, the question and its answer, burning in the dark.
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