Dearest D.L.D.,

I’ve been thinking about what I really want to get away from. That question keeps resurfacing like an ache. I need a time out. I think of that horrific scene from Private Ryan where the reality hits him for the first time: facing of his own death, Mellish tells his killer to stop. He doesn’t plead. He states it as though he has a right to call it all off. To call a time out so that he can regroup and prepare.

I cannot explain this churning sense of panic in my solar plexus.

My new copy of Conference of the Birds arrived. It’s about the journey that you have to take to learn that the journey was unnecessary.

I have always wondered how you felt at the end of your life. If you saw the journey as necessary? What you made of the “usefulness” of your life as you lived to see it all undone, piece by piece, by new theories, salacious therapies, and the resurfacing of despair. Eugenics.