There is a woman with a shrill voice. She is standing on the platform, quietly, stiffly, and she is waiting for the train. She stands erect with tranquility, but her calm is forced. Her hands, inside her long overcoat, are twitching; in secret she deftly twiddles her thumbs. Her boots are black leather, tall, scuffed, and military. Her feet are sweating, but not because her boots are warm. She wears an old shawl, and one can tell, from the lines around her lemon mouth, that she has a shrill, deodorant stick of a voice. Her overcoat is brown, her shawl is brown, her dress, one imagines, is brown, and her whole life is brown.

The train is slowing, chugging, and soon he will step onto the platform, and she will greet him. He is not expecting her. He is sleeping, he has been sleeping for hours and hours. The ride has been prosperous with sleep. It is his first sleep in many days, and he enjoys the chairs that recline back, and when he first sat down and closed his eyes, he imagined himself lying a luscious field of wavy green grass. He closed his eyes, sank deep into the grass, and nothing but a dream. When he awakens it was a dream. She was a dream, he was a dream, the train was a dream.

----

Northern Michigan welcomes me with open simplicity. How I have longed for such life. Such a wonderful, slow existence this is. I have been awake for ten hours, and it is mid-afternoon. I awoke before anyone else and I went downstairs, quietly, and began to move around the kitchen. Within the merest fraction of an hour the rest of the household was awake and moving about, some less sleepily than others, and I less sleepily than most. Soon I had been the willing audience to a series of unplanned, but brilliant, discourses and diatribes on the merits of employment, education, athletics, religion, and nearly every other topic that fell into the age-determined interest level of the speaker, of which there were five.

I feel dead again.

I feel alive again. We played a game this afternoon, her and I. We sat and ate a lunch that we had prepared for ourselves, and we played a game. It was a nice game, and I won, but that is of little or, for her, no importance, for we enjoyed the game and each other.

I have spent little time outside today, and, for the most part, I have not regretted my passivity. I feel alive again. My mind is working, my passions are burning, and the flames are singeing anything that draws nigh. I have spoken with enthusiasm, to different audiences of one, of what inspires and angers me.

Oh, but for the dream that never dies. For dreams are the most beautiful enterprises of humanity. Dreams are not solely of the mind, or the heart, or the soul; dreams are of the being, they are an impossible and perfect culmination of the mental, emotional, and spiritualities that guide and motivate the individual. For one to quell, without tying first to quench, the foundations that bear a dream is the bitterest of suicides

I feel alive again, and I have some weeks to follow my passions and enjoy life again. I have been unchained, and the reality and beauty of life appears before me with, oh, so much clarity. My eyes are open again, and I love the inexplicable, enticing beauty that is the ten-year-old girl as she peeks her head around the corner and runs into my arms. Life is the untraceable trails made by her soft and fast hands, elbows, and arms as she illustrates the wonder of her day. Her eyes, how they flash, and her hair, how it waves and bounces like the white tail of a deer on the run, and her words, how they flow, sometimes unsteadily and unsure; life is the simple honesty that I find in the open soul of a ten-year-old.

I feel so alive again.

LETTERS FROM READERS