Now insofar as I can understand it the situation is a lot like one I was in this summer. I decided upon a whim to put the Rangerover in park and climb out from its air conditioned coolness into the hot and unforgiving desert I was crossing. I decided I had to feel that desolation, experience it for myself in its blazing and brutal fullness.
The first thing I noticed, as my paws touched the sands, was how truly hot they were. Like molten silk, softly sneaking between every pad as my weight made me sink slightly into the dune. The second thing I noticed was the wind, how it caressed my fur with a heat all its own, its howling voice blowing from the east and bringing with it grit that stung my narrowed eyes and the smells of sun baked stone and haunting nothingness.
It threatened to steal my hat, and as it was snatched from my brow I managed to catch it in midair. The right side of my face twisted into a snarl of distaste, bared a fang to the foul, unseen djinn the locals hereabouts swear control such winds.
The third thing I noticed, after the initial shock of leaving behind a climate controlled cabin of first world comfort was how vast, empty and desolate the wasteland was. The sky was so blue and perfect and cloudless it seemed something painted, and the ocean of dunes were dry and mountainous waves whose long shadows seemed so dark and impossible in contrast to such brightness that they could only be called surreal.
For a split second I felt a lightness that challenged my sense of reality, caught my consciousness up in the question many ask upon such occasions: awake or dreaming? And in that confusing instant some small thing whispers both, ever and always.
Perhaps this is so, though a fox like me will never know.
I think these times are a lot like that one, because until one takes the time to stop and count the blessings and curses and weigh the balance in fullness one is lost, hypnotized if you will, by the power they hold over the soul and mind. It's all too easy to surrender control to circumstance and situation, raise the sails of life's ship and trust in tide and fate and gust and god and lose sight of the fact that the first choice was to choose to have them.
I'd like to say that, with this glass finally empty, and these musings down in black and white, that I'll choose to say enough is enough. Yet for Adeline it never is, and since -
Well, enough of this. For now. On the morrow I'll be asked to choose again, stand upon the gleaming coast and ask again real or ghost. I already know the answer though I beg you to remember: sometimes you have the power to write your future.