In Heaven, All Things Are Impossible

You will never be a winged creature, Margaret. Never!

9/14/25 5:30pm

Of course, it is not easy for anything to stop once it has begun. It isn't easy for the cars passing just off my home's walkway to brake without their driver first deciding so. Many would say that this is not possible. I say that it is not easy. On the same front, I say that it is not easy to halt my teeth from chewing my gums. There are many blisters forming, and given the blister on my wrist and the blisters on my heels, I'd rather they not also be in my mouth. So I wish for them to stop, though they do not intend to and though it is not easy. On the same front, I say it is not easy to warm to the chill on my upper arms nor to dry the sweat building on his napping neck. It is not easy to turn a strong chin aside from the howling cicadas of fear just about everywhere I'm inclined to look. But, cicadas molt and change into something still a cicada but no more the same; so, why not, though it isn't easy, why should I not be brave? Couldn't my metallic skin break off clean, splintered like a chewed-through toothpick swallowed by the mouth of a braver man who's already leveraged the kale from his molars? Couldn't my skin grow back smoother than lacquered oak? I would live a much more comfortable life, peppered probably by entourages of sweets and niceties, if I could believe that these changes were impossible. The shivers and sweats and the mouth-blisters the shivers cultivate through possession of my teeth are markers of the unfortunate alterity I hold to be true: anything is possible. Dreams may and will be achieved, cars will take over their operators like my gnawing teeth take over my will, you might find love, we could end world hunger, I might be an incarnation from the thirty-third planet to Earth's left. All of this puts a pit in your stomach because it is the same faith that tears the skin from the cicada's body and the same faith that haunts your dreams at night. But atheism is the Happy Man's happiness and the religion of those who reap the fruits of "impossible" while spreading numbing ointment on your blisters.

Stay still, the Happy Man coos, there's nothing for you to do.