Some early thoughts on Valentine's day

After finishing the swimming of my worst workouts in a very long time I realized that there were some things that were harder to give up than coffee.  Its not that I didn't swim hard for the short time I was in the water, but I was unable to focus or perhaps losing focus.  I was unable to find any groove, there was no mindlessness.  In the end, a pain that was intangible and outside of my body became too great, the patience of the repetitive act of swimming (breath, don't breath, breath, etc) overwhelmed by something too immediate and bitter.
Like most of you, I live my life on a sharp edge, between personal oblivion and impersonal oblivion.  It hasn't always been like that, but that is how things are now.   But there are things that make the threat of oblivion less painful to contemplate.  Now however, it is not the presence, but the absence which is a weight pushing me down, threatening to cut me in half against the razor sharp edge that is moving against life.
More alone than most, perhaps that is a choice, perhaps it was planning for something that is as close as the difference between safety and destruction, just beyond my reach, close enough to touch, but not to grasp.
It is about more than loneliness or margins, it is also about ego, the uncomfortable existence of failure in the presence of success.   It isn't a place that I have been long, but one which I have been forced to contemplate for many years.
The book I am reading is long and tedious full of information on the Roman origins, of law, of architecture, of the failure of civilization, the birth of law and pandemic.  It is not a bad book, but it touches on every aspect only so much and the purpose is unclear, like the direction of my life, crowded with choices, with disasters, but uncertain now where there was at least a goal before.
So there will be no roses for me, no relief from the nightmares that assail me, no pithy card, no suggestion of something greater to strive for.  It will happen all around me, but I will enjoy nothing but its absence.  And I will try to swim again and I will count another day without drinking coffee, an addiction that has shrunk so much in  proportion that it no longer exists.