The Chase of Publication
and if I could keep it up
god, if I could keep that up
I’d go absolutely right straight crazy to heaven
– from “This Darknight Speed” by Eloise Klein Healy
The air won’t come fast enough. I’m dodging through trees, trying to catch a glimpse, and I can’t breath enough in. 
The unicorn. The breath of a great horned owls wings. The whisper of a muslin skirt of a friend I have never known.
It feels like the chase in a dream. I am close.
I chase something attainable, and I do so at my leisure. Others have run for very life . . . and for the freedom to chase their own dreams.
***
To put a book into the world with fanfare – horns and heralds, those men with hair that curls just below their chins and the long drapes of cloth that fold over them like gilded aprons. To shape an entrance for these thousand words . . . for these people written then – always for the people.
It leaves me breathless. Tired and edged-off.
It feels like I may never get there.
Yet, I do not want to wake from this non-dream. The bliss of the chase, the promise of what is there, ahead, shimmering.
The hope that one day I might hear someone speak of Cato or Nelson like they’ve met them. That these people will become Hesters or Sulas or Asher Levs. That someone might know a Berthier and find their way to this earlier man and know him family.
I chase on through margins and press releases. On to the end.
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