The last rays of the sun caressed a soft paint of a sad gold on the brave steel towers of the young city. The dark ink of the quiet night hung watchful on the opposite horizon, stealthily creeping into the space given up by the receding light. The glass and steel vertices of the craggy city center reflected glints of the fading glow through my windows, as I sat contemplating the unbearable despair of being sentenced inside my skull for the rest of my life.

Here it is all, my feverish mind croaked from the corner of the familiar damp prison-cell: look at the pastel gradient of the dusk sky, the brown winter fingers of the tree branches scratched across that easel. Look at that incredible ambitious human habitat in the distance that lunges forth into the vertical. Look at all the being and the happening and the contemplatable beautiful in the observable world. This all I have given you, this all I create for you, this is me, do you not see? What of do you complain then? The very perfection and stillness against which you judge your being to be so ill and incomplete is also born out of and crafted and witnessed by another part of that very same being. What then necessitates this constant comparison and dog-fighting part of your living experience against another? As you give away the prize to one, do you not also create the rejected rest that will moan and claw and keep heaving their pathetic languishing dying breaths in this lightless cave?

Do you not see, that it is not in fact any property of what you call the inhabitable prison of your skull, but your incessant readiness to jump to heartless rejections of the home of your living, that is the root of your psychosis? Let it go, let it all go. It is not an affliction, it is an indulgence. You are clinging to the mythic tree that you complain will not let you free. It is not an act of acquiring more, it is an act of doing and demanding less. It is here, right here, the key is in your palm, why won’t you look? There is room always to step back, opportunities always to keep unclenching that fist from the sand you wish so hard to hold on to.