Noted

She writes you late at night, so late that it's become summer daylight in her Arctic corner of the world, there's a manic magic to it that your heart knows and misses. I just don't need to sleep, she says as she stumbles home from her studio. You speak of the world and she sends you poetry, a conversation that began years ago and never really ended, only changed color a little as you both learned to surf the agony of being alive. If they make me choose between love and art, I must choose art, she says, her chest like lead. I wish I didn't have to choose. You think of your deals with the devil and wonder if you're trying to renegotiate the terms of service. A stray thought dances off to cabins in the wilderness, to midnight sun and Pacific solitude, to a life in motion and discovery and the Word constantly at your fingertips. You remember the colors of your dreams and wonder how you got so comfortable in convention.

But I sat today with the Word at my side, I rolled in its fallen leaves and nurtured its hesitating sprouts, I danced in a story that spoke to me as though it weren't my own and it made me forget the time on my clock, the hunger in my belly, the sorrow on my brow. I sat today with the Word as my companion and remembered a lifetime in love with its steady comfort, a lifetime in awe of its magic. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. How many hours have passed, I cannot say, it does not matter. A story builds and weaves through my fevered limbs, my tooth hurts, the mouse eats the peanut butter off the traps and leaves unscathed, a rent check sweeps through to clean out my bank account, I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light 
and 
I 
have 
no 
shame.

I resign the lease. Succumb to the deal I've made.