Help.

Everything that disturbed me so concretely yesterday has left, leaving only its shadow in my mind. I cannot address it, for I cannot see it. But I can't dismiss it, for it is not gone. 

It's haunting.

I sit in the sun on my parent's porch on the northern plains of Minnesota. Today I've sought diversions (quite successfully) each moment I've been near the solidification of these thoughts. This morning I woke, and looking out my window, I noticed the rot in the wooden frame holding the glass just outside my room. I remembered when Mom stained them last, and I knew then it was this which troubled me most: 

HERE, THERE IS DECAY IN SUSTAIN.

Like the pedals on a piano, our efforts set forth to prolong the beauty

and progress we have known in our lives, but despite all our striving,

there is decay in sustain. Like the chords left ringing in the strings

of an instrument, if we do not keep playing, the beauty will fade, and

ultimately come to die.

For all the lessons I've learned, for all the memories I've made, for all the beauty I've beheld, there has been striving to sustain. To keep that which has come; to capture the goodness in all its glory; to hold the truth in its youthfulness (though truth cannot really be young) and make it mine forever. I ache in apathy, because it cannot be done.

THERE IS DECAY IN SUSTAIN. 

This hurt testifies to me of a realm where it is not so - where a moment of intimacy, beauty, or progress rings with full intensity from its birth throughout all eternity. And because this ache is in me, I know I am meant for that realm. And so in this, I guess, there is hope.