This Used To Be Me

18.08.2003 - 00.40
The Tree or "Darryl Can't Write."

I can't remember what kind of tree it was, but it was the largest of its' kind in the nation, rising from the ground with the slightest casual lean, encrusted with moss, dust, and spiderwebs. The the first branches didn't begin for twenty meters up the trunk, and those were trimmed so as to not tangle with the tips of shorter, lesser trees. I could barely see the top, as it was lost in the canopy of leaves from its lesser cousins, but I could quite easily make out the bird's nests; all the while, however, my thoughts went not outward but downward, trying to form an estimate of how far and wide this gorgeous living thing stretched through the earth.

What made it the most beautiful thing I've ever seen wasn't its height, or its width or branches or any other overt manifestation of its majesty; rather, it was the gash the lightning had made, six or seven meters up, stretching a third of the way around the tree's circumference, leaving jagged, scarred wood already turning smooth again. The infinite energy of the world touched it, seared it with power that would have destroyed anything I hold to my sickeningly parodic minute degree of importance, and it was still standing, reaching higher than any other for the sun, somehow pumping enough water upwards to sustain it, to insure its perpetuity. There had to have been billions of life forms in and around that trunk, millions of worlds in a universe that began hundreds of years before and would hopefully end hundreds of years after I became able to poison the air with my inane hypotheses of the nature of life.

The punchline: this unspeakable perfection, and the warmth it put in my being, only further validates how purely fucking useless, trite, and ridiculous every word that comes from my mouth truly is.

then - soon

25.09.2003-Epilogue.

01.09.2003-

30.08.2003-Exeunt, the Moor.

28.08.2003-why?

27.08.2003-Last night, and august in general.