"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none."
Wow. Those are the opening lines of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I needed a good book. I just finished Into the Wild, and when my days are kind of gray the way they have been for what seems like a long time now, I need something to preoccupy my mind. To take it far, far away from here. And since I can't bring a guitar on the train for the two hours I'm riding it, that means a book.
Still, there's something very hopeful about those lines, huh? About him feeling the child breathing next to him. Maybe you have to be a parent to feel that. Once I wrote the line, "When my daughter sleeps, the warmth that comes off her head could breathe the life back into a dead man."
Because it did.
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