It must be the music, shaping my soul like the river carves the canyon. The melody to bait my passion, drawing out longing and desire, stoking my hidden fires until my surface warms and flickers. The harmony to obscure the two-dimensionality of fervor, to breathe life into monosyllables, to calm the scattered remnant of my rational mind. The chord progressions an all-to-literal analogy for the cycles of my error; there is no progress, only repetition, for I find myself willing to face old enemies to relive old pleasures.
Or perhaps it is the peculiar clarity of night, when stillness and darkness breed a careful focus. Nothing exists but the twenty feet of pocked pavement in the headlights, and the faded streaks of paint that blink by like a yellow metronome. The ponderous globe of reality becomes minute and mobile, and the borders between reality and thought grow less substantial. Gradually, as warmth gathers beneath a quilt, old burdens float to the surface, like detritus but for that I value them as if they were jewels in the crown of my redemption and not shovel-fulls of dirt atop my coffin.
But sometimes, when I sit here with my iTunes and my Solitaire, I wonder if perhaps I ought to be elsewhere. What happens when a man takes a wrong turn and leaves destiny behind? When fear reaches that critical density and my thoughts slow for a U-turn, I sigh into the hyperbola of my one-way street. Soon I am off again, passion subsiding into the monotony of moments, the sphere of my world waxing and waning like a beacon for those who would avoid my fate.