Why travel if you're blind? You can't see

"But the blind are merely casual observers of life. Lack of being, but recorders of being." stated the ambivalent
"No. We have method...Even when listening to traffic the mind draws its own pictures of the streets crowded with Russian ghosts and wheels that have broken loose from their carriages." replied the blind anterior
He turned and admitted the failure of his thought
There is more than the two lives he distinguished: the life of the one who suffers,
and the life of the one who records the suffering of others
The third is the one oblivious to life beyond the conventions that they are hurled into
The third is the living dead
The good old salt of the Earth who delivers hemlock
Salt of the Earth makes the land barren

How helpless they looked in the ugliness of sleep
A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike
Some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny
They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths.
They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping
The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something
Not to be onto something is to be in despair

It’s almost sad what we shed in the changing room
I’d step out of the shirts of my family, who always carry time with them
I cling to them blindly
This ocean did once taste of home
Coasts being only where what’s walkable stops, not some ballad of hand and slate
Beach only dumping ground for the floatable

So I don’t float
So I never loved my floatable ones
So what
As if it brings them back

We know to dive, not for tidal wave and not for subterrain,
but for making echo, knowing nothing of each other’s loss
We dove
I knew you and never knew you
Both happened
Both true

I want to smell different and remind people of new things based on smell alone
I want to smell alone, reminding things of people when they were different
I want different reminders, basing smells on people being alone

The morning was swift and bruised, a vivid pillar

Then I lost it

You carry your memories like a sack of old stones
Though some are lighter than air
Sleep is the place where the bones can rest
Unless the world follows you there

I was in my house
I knew that
But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything
—Raymond Carver