WRITING:

He’d put it off so long that when he finally planned and gave in to its ways it was, he thought, something of a disappointment.  Like Fairbanks in the winter or the monsoon season of the island seas, there was a side he hadn’t seen or worried for.  But welcome is the holiday vacation from the real and so he slid willingly enough into the darkness.  He closed his eyes and even with the pounding rain and ice it still was a far better place to be.  All he wanted was to rest his weary mind and matter from the longer journey he’d been on.  And there is never here except for someone else; no path can be the same as that at just the moment in the shock of time that is the now and present for one man.  Soothing were the cotton sheets and spoon-fed by the mob he felt himself falling further still to depths and places where no one asked and no one gave and no one took away.  Prepaid by living to this point in time it was another kind of freedom that he sought if he were ever able to return.

But as I said, he’d put it off so long, and held his money tight as costs flew higher.  Inflation took the price beyond his grasping of the real, and no, he never did come back home again.