I am not dying. Not because of MS anyway. Or of anything else that I know of at the moment. But I am living more vitally, more completely--and that is because of MS. It's an irony, yes? A paradox.

Illness and disability have a way of making mortality more real, more immediate, than it had seemed before. The motions of time have entered me physically, flowing now in my blood, buzzing in my extremities, burning little holes in my brain.

What I do not do today may not have time for being done tomorrow. I am pressed, impatient, frustrated by the notion of proper channels and appropriate emotions. I want to connect, today, this minute, for I have come to realize that time has never been a thing that could be spared.

I want to retrieve the embers of all in life that has been best, to catch them up, still glowing, from the dreary depths to whence they had been sent by weakness, by pride, by wounded love, and hold them again--not to remember, but to see, to touch, to redraw the very breath of conception.

Please believe me--the past is not so very important that it should accompany the future to its death. Here is where all the chances are stored up--here, now, in this time, this life. How sad when even a single one is let slip between our fingers.