We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.

My "heart". Does that pitiful organ still represent anything? It lies motionless in my chest, pumping no blood, serving no purpose, and yet my feelings still seem to originate inside its cold walls. My muted sadness, my vague longing, my rare flickers of joy. They pool in the center of my chest and seep out of there, diluted and faint, but real.

Everything you see, you might be seeing for the last time.

But I'm not afraid of the skeletons in Julie's closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.

Are we all just Dark Age doctors, swearing by our leeches? We crave a greater science. We want to be proven wrong.

I can feel it... the chance to start over, to live right, to love right, to burn up in a fiery cloud and never again be buried in the mud.

Peel off these dusty wool blankets of apathy and antipathy and cynical desiccation. I want life in all its stupid sticky rawness.