These days, I take long walks.

If nothing else I find that in the company of nothing but my own shadow, I can be silent without objection. So often I am in the company of others, of my herd, of men. Always, I am in the company of Manhattan's ghost. But to take long walks on dying afternoons such as this one is to get as close to solitude as I can.

This, I need more than I crave.

Aging suits me well, from an objective standpoint I understand this. Until the pain leaves, however, the slow rise in my height, the evening of my hindered stride, means nothing to me. Should this be a permanent curse, I will always be made a child by the infirmity it casts upon me. This is the sorrow of illness, the disease of the crippling hurt of Gods.

With the sun fading, I am made to think of that God who stood so beautiful that even in days just shortly after my birth, I wanted him. There was something like a unique lust to be something that powerful and strong that as I take slow, painful steps into a shadowed wood, I am reminded of.

I do not think anything hurts a god like that. The Sun God whose body is made of gold, the Earth God who presides over death but makes no note of the sorrow it inflicts on mortal... these are powerful beings.

I am too humbled by the hurt I have seen and felt to think I could ever have such eminence, but when the earth softens beneath my feet and I find myself lost, I wonder if I could at least once experience a life without pain.

As much as I wish to lay down and rest, I've learned quickly that the pain in my spine only cinches tighter, grips more viciously, when I move to the earth. Despite the sharpness of my listening, the wide scope of my soft ears, my eyesight cannot keep up. There is, in the near distance, a dying and heart-wrenching song. I know its beauty, I understand its proximity, but I have no hope at finding it on my own. A soft whinny, not so much seeking as answering sorrowfully, as mutually pained, escapes my lips and my teeth clack in a childlike gesture that I, with my soft mouth, have not yet outgrown. I once saw my father make the same noise, the same clattering of teeth that cries out to the world: do not hurt me, for I am but a child and this world has more danger than I ever knew of before this moment.

I only pitied him, then. I did not yet quite understand how much hurt this world really contained.

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