They are demolishing a building here, now the hammer drives through the windows, glass splinters everywhere glisten like morning dew, now it strikes a column and it shudders under the impact. Crowds mill around the yard, few stand with me and look perhaps as mesmerized as I am by falling concrete and twisted steel.

Soon everything would change, everything is changing even as I write: sun is curving behind this tree towards night, the tree's shadow is inching imperceptiably towards evening, clouds that rained throughout yesterday night are moving south to the sea, a guy has just kissed a girl, they are in love, I can see that from here, but soon they may not be anymore, a butterfly which must have transitioned from a puape a few days ago has just flapped its wings twenty times or more over a bed of marigolds,a few marigolds are already turning brown from golden, that house whose walls your voice glued together is falling apart and nothing seems to hold it up. And for no reason at all just as you had come, you have already left, only your memories remain hovering like dragonflies, sunning themselves around me.

They say that they will clear the mounds of mangled steel and shattered glass in a week. And just like that, soon nothing will remain.

2002:08:19 15:00 Atlanta

I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which came to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which came to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.

fully alive - dawna markova