A wave of emotions ran over me...a deep hurt and a sense of loss of all the people, places, and events that were once so intrinsic to my life—all of that is gone or at the very least, simply out of reach. That which seems familiar and recent is the same that I realize happened years ago.

Is this Vedder's Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town? Do "hearts and thoughts they fade, fade away?"

I head out to claim that which was lost. I forge deeply into fasting and refuse to punt into passivity. I leave the freezing of fears and the felicity of foods and head out to the les mauvaises terres à traverser tonight. I cleave the machination mooring and claim the imagination emancipation. I reject the parameters, the purposes, and the purports of others while denying within me the Scarecrow, the Tinman, and the Cowardly Lion animatronics clanking in their uncanny valley.

An empty expanse lays out before me. The last embers of the day shirk into the horizon. The night awaits...