This is where it ends
Past perfect future tense
Altered state of mind
Your words no longer grind

- "Uh Oh" by Taken by Cars

Hopscotch. The game that became the motif (and the title) of that novel by Julio Cortazar. In my case, it is the strategy I have learned to employ to balance, to temper the many compartments of me. (I recall the very friend who was the first - and last - to point this out. Did he feel a smug sense of accomplishment, having stringed the words all by himself? Or was it the equivalent of the unexpected discovery of a precious gem in a swamp of faux? It is irrelevant as of this point, as it was doomed to be irrelevant the first time.)

Hopscotch. I was in danger of drowning in the anxieties and pathologies of others. We are comrades in the thick molasses of it all, but when it starts to fill the nostrils and provokes the fifth-grader knee-jerk reaction to flail and wave and signal for rescue, the mechanism for self-preservation is already too late.

Hopscotch. I had to seek refuge in the land of what is ground zero of my personal history, the place where things may be thought simple, but when it comes to the fundamental and human, simple is as simple can be. Cause and effect. Give and take. Action and reaction.

* * *
Excited and catching my own breath. Happening too fast, the consequences may be too much for me to appreciate. Let the appreciation come to me in good time, as it so deserves.

Oh, what can happen in a month?