Thoughts on Feeling Fine
I am apart
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Always I have seen around me all the games and parades
of life
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and have always envied the players and the marchers.
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I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the
hollowness
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as the big drums go by,
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and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who
wants parades?
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The world seems to be masses of smiling people
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who hug each other and sway back and forth in front
of a fire
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and sing old songs and laugh into each others faces,
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all truth and trust.
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And I kneel at the edge of the woods,
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too far to feel the heat of the fire.
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Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand
way
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which I cannot describe.
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Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they?
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Yet when most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to
respond with smirk or sneer,
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another page in my immense catalog of remorses.
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I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible,
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touching what has never been touched,
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but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness.
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I am living without being truly alive.
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I can love without loving.
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When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter,
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closeness, empathy, warmth,
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sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off
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and think that they do not really know who is with them
there,
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what strangness is there beside them, trying to be something else.
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Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate
about subjective things,
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I tried to tell (my friend)Meyer all this.
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I shall never forget the strange expression on his face.
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“But we are all like that!” he said
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“That’s the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn’t
you know?”
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I tried to believe him.
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But belief is a very difficult feat
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when you crouch out here in the night,
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too far from the fire to feel its heat,
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too far from the people to hear the words of their songs
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— John D. MacDonald,
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