an effective ritual offers no safe catharsis

What color is magic?

Magic has no color, son.

I wrote those words years ago. I was wrong. Magic has all the colors. Or maybe I’m wrong still: magic is beyond colors. There are colors we can’t even perceive, after all. Do they exist? Might as well ask if you exist. (You don’t.)

A couple of nights ago there was a windstorm. I lay in bed listening. I imagined the wind tearing the roof off my house. It could reach in and grab me and pull me wherever it wished. There would be nothing I could do to stop it. It could throw me across the street onto the neighbor’s wet deck. It could carry me to Antarctica and drop me on the frozen ground. It could raise me three inches off my bed and gently set me down again. Or it could howl outside but leave the roof alone, leaving me falsely thinking I was safe beneath the covers. (You are never safe.)

Every night before I fall asleep I imagine myself as the planet Neptune. I think of how cold it is, a cold we can’t fathom, yet I try very hard to imagine what that feels like. I then picture a trail of stars in the sky and how sometimes when death scares me I imagine that after death I can walk a trail of stars and go anywhere in the universe I want. This thought comforts me; I recognize it as my mind’s best attempt to visualize the molecules gathered in me breaking apart and being free to roam. You can’t expect the conscious mind to imagine its non-existence. (You are never awake.)

This is the question that obsesses me the most: what will be the last book I read, and will I know it is the last when I read it? There are days I cannot get this question out of my head. I will probably not be able to answer it until after the fact. And that makes me sad; I’d like to ritualize the reading of the last book of my life. Put great effort into choosing it. Parse the pages out carefully and savor every word. Sip my favorite Scotch or my favorite coffee while reading. Read it out loud: sing the words! Feel the way they roll of my tongue. Think about their meanings. And, as I finish each page, say thank you. Thank you for that page and for a lifetime of reading. (You do not say thank you enough.)