" Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to preserve it. "

The day will come, you know, when I am no longer around again.
And it did.
And here it is.

I left quietly in the morning. I remembered which boards creaked and to lift the door of the fridge so that the hinge didn't squeak.
I didn't make any coffee or even smoke any cigarettes. I wanted it raw, I wanted the morning to be raw and I refused to dull that with phony little pleasures or postulations.

The bedroom door was open and I looked in again but, and only, for the last time. She was still sleeping and dreaming about the fair I promised to take her to on Tuesday. She loved the roller-coaster and the thrills like that. She was on her side and facing the wall away from me. I cried to not see her face because I knew if did she would have seemed an angel and I would have made coffee and taken off those well-worn boots and put my keys back on the table and woke her up with a kiss and breakfast and the promise of a new day.

But she slept and was turned away in her dreams. And I wept solid like a man whose heart has broke again and for the last time.

By noon I was 360 km away from that bed. By dinner I was 1038 km away from a cold meal waiting at an empty seat at that table.

I made that table one fall. We had gone for a country drive and in a state of love I had ripped off the side of an abandoned barn-door. The planks were cedar and had already lasted one hundred years or more. After a date with my belt-sander and several layers of Tung Oil I pressed those planks together tight and left the clamps on for a week. Those barn-door-planks became our table on which we ate and fought and even several times fucked.

I knew that by this time, at 11:00 p.m., my dinner was still there. It was accompanied by a tear-smeared note telling me what a selfish prick I was, etc.

Sometimes, though, life needs medicine.

Sometimes, one needs to leave it all and everything and just go.

Sometimes, through tears and wails and fears and taboos, you have just got to get fucking going. Somewhere. Away and alone.

I changed my diet the most, though, in early February.
The Olancho Mountains were brutal in the winter and the rain nearly drowned me.
But I managed to build a place out of mountain pines.
Honduras was good to me and I had made friends in Catacamas.

I would hunt when I could and sell what I didn't eat or smoke.

Life was new and good and as time went on I forgot things.

I came across an old shepherd's hut one time, though, and took the door from the hinges.
I strapped it to my back and walked back up the mountain to my pine home.
I used bark with sap on it and spread it around evenly. I heated the pine bark on an open flame until the sap became liquid, then sprinkled sand over it ind doused it in cold water from the stream below. I used the crude sandpaper and smoothed the door from the shepherd's hut. I didn't even build a frame for that table top and had no finishing oil. It lay bare on my floor.

There was never a cold meal waiting on that table nor was there a tear-smeared note telling me that I was such a selfish dick.

I liked it in Olancho.