fanboying

Dear Adele,

I love you.

XOXO

Bryan

The Riddle of the Castle on a Cloud

Maybe this is the sort of moment when riddles have an afterglow of their own, a wisdom that illuminates the edges of experience when nothing else can. In a world where half of the villagers always lie and half of them always tell the truth; where the hare never catches the tortoise because the distance between them shrinks be a never collapsing infinity of halves; where the fox can never be left of the same bank of the river as the hen, or the hen on the same bank as the grain, because with perfect regularity the one will consume the other, and nothing you can do will prevent it; in that world, everything is sensible but the premise.

A riddle is a castle built on air, perfectly habitable if you don't look down... And if I accept its existence, then the foundation is set and the impossible castle can be built. The rest is just mortar and stones.

-- p.364, The Rule of Four

i once believed

i was thinking just now about how i believed everything you said to me two years ago. at first i was hesitant to see what you have for both of us because it was all too big and i, being the cynical and practical one, couldn't -- wouldn't want to look at the picture you were trying to paint.

eventually, however, i started to see the little images of us in the future. slowly, yet surely, i was able to appreciate the colors you were trying to paint, the yet abstract picture you were trying to show. and i was there, slowly walking towards your proud painting... standing, gazing at its vivid hues, its tiny complexities, its profundities.

as time progressed and as i began to focus my sight on other things, i have unwittingly seen the wholeness of it in my peripheral vision. there it was in its marvelous glory -- still all colorful, complex, profound... abstract.

there never was that painting. it was crumbling when i saw it. it was a mess -- a huge, ugly, crumbling mess that i once believed to be a beautiful work of art.

the thing is, in my quiet time, i still think of that beautiful mess. thinking that maybe, if only that could have been true, how wonderful it is be looking at it everyday. to have always stood in awe in front of it. to have been experiencing the wholeness of it and appreciating it every single day.

that's all i have now. a thought, a figment of a memory that once was that i once believed.