I want a planet all to myself.
I want it to cradle me in its benevolent bosom.
I want it to protect me from the relentless, the unbearable anxiety that is my affliction.
I want shelter from life’s mournful fluctuations.
I want to conquer death—or at least to make it forgetful.
I want the universe to love and preserve me, forever.
Or if not that, I want to waft without end in a delicious suspended animation: peacefully to float in the warm amniotic currents of dreamtime.
I want to be able to ford great rivers, to skip over mountains, to fly across the sky, to breathe under water, to move through walls, to turn back time.
I want to explore the ruins left by the people who came before and abandoned this place.
I want to reckon these multitudes and become them.
I want to span the benign expanses of the silent wildernesses and of the haunted oceans.
I want to talk to the trees and the wind, and read the testimony of every speck of dirt, of every grain of sand.
I want to bless all the hidden beasts and soothe their disquiet.
I want my compassion to grow from a flickering ember to a wildfire, to an inferno, to a blazing star, to a supernova, to an all-embracing conflagration.
I want to know no fear.
I want to see through demons.
I want to be music.
I want to sing myself—to sing all of us.
I want to sweep the land with my brittle, shaky voice.