What I See is the Light Falling All Around Us

To have understood some small piece of the world more deeply doesn’t have to mean we’re not as lost as before, or so it seems this morning, random bees stirring among the dogwood blossoms, a few here and there stirring differently, somehow, more like resisting stillness. . . Should it come to winnowing my addictions, I’d hold on hardest, I’m pretty sure, to mystery, though just yesterday, a perfect stranger was so insistent that I looked familiar, it seemed easier in the end to agree we must know each other.
To his body, a muscularity both at odds and at one with how fragile everything else about him, I thought, would be, if I could see inside. What’s the word for the kind of loneliness that can feel like swimming unassisted in a foreign language, for the very first time?

— Carl Phillips