What matters most is how I feel.

Writing this to prove to myself that it happened, that I sat on the terrace on damp and cloudy day, mist covering anything and everything 200 m ahead, but then eventually lifting as the road from here runs to a bright and sunny coast an hour or so away. That I sat on the terrace with the more clownish of the two cats and we both simply were, me with a cup of peppermint tea and my breathing, she with her paws on the wet ground.

Elsewhere, far down that road and beyond, the rich and powerful did their thing, tried to achieve something of this peace after their explosive orgasms and boundless explorations of joy, others felt class anxiety at the dizzying, unimaginable gulf between themselves and the real lords and ladies, and kicked down all the harder, still more struggled to afford a dignified life and peace of mind at any price.

Meanwhile, hidden from the world, the more clownish of the two cats and I did nothing, almost nothing, and achieved everything that needed to be done.

I was repressed, by myself and the systems in which I was enmeshed, and so my main aim as a young and youngish man, teens to 30s, was to escape, a process that required a number of deaths on my part, the shedding of skin, the zombie-self stuttering and shuddering on three continents, until I emerged self-made from broken parts and molded by experience, the world having moved on without any great need for my services.

I'd squandered my limited promise on getting ready for a stupid party that was already over, and turned to face new challenges I was wholly ill-prepared for.

On days like these the world moves as it should and it all seems easy: stay healthy, stay solvent, stay curious, stay active.

Pain, misery, emptiness, and loss seem impossible now, as if drugged, but I'm doing this on fresh ginger, lemon balm and chamomile, stretching when I can and looking at the trees in the distance, feeling my breath as the body takes control.

If only it could last.

"Why am I not doing that?" I think - about so many things - when the truth is I'm busy, always have been, playing a game of my own devising, one that tries to make sense of myself while feeling alive and complete in each moment, an approach that demands as much emptiness as fullness, if not more.

And in truth, or true enough, or at least a momentarily plausible lie that holds up well to little scrutiny, things could never have been different.

I am what I am. A man made in pain, always seeking refuge or escape.

The realization that I'm just floating here, just barely, buffeted by the waves and currents of increasingly terrible and terrifying events, with fabled creatures of the deep moving ever upward.

I look around and see only darkness.

Despite being at the secret center of the universe I am (of course) utterly ordinary, now leading an uneventful life in a quiet town in a European backwater far from any notion of “home”, with nothing interesting to say, nothing interesting to do, just biding my time until there’s none left, almost none, when then I’ll look back at what I did and didn’t do, the hours unspent productively, when none of it will matter.

It’s one way to live, I suppose.

And as I write this it’s all sincere, with the soft round pain of a three-drink hangover behind my right eye making me feel empty and stupid on a Saturday morning. The center of my universe is broken.

But later – when the water and coffee kick in, when I take out the trash and feel the sky above me, walk to the grocery store and stretch my eyes by looking at the far distant mountains that I will never climb – I’ll feel magnificent, and the whole great wheel will start turning again.

I will live another ordinary, uneventful day, alive at the center of it all.

I lie in bed and stretch from head to toe, focus on my breathing, and prepare to confront what I think I wanted when I was younger, when I was young. Let's say 18.

I remember, or think I remember, because the pain, some decades old and rather vague - like the outline of a bruise - is a little disorienting. Is it now or then, and where does it hurt?

Well, let's not be dramatic. I had a lot of pain then and not much now, none at all as I write.

I remember having no real interest in money, or career, or any aims at all beyond being left to myself and exploring that. I wanted a bohemian life, of a sort. A life of my own, with interests and books, a life abroad and with love, novelty, colors and peace.

I remember now, I think I remember. I wanted to be left alone and find some treasure that no one could touch, no one could steal.

And I found it.

Old friends come for a casual lunch, stopping by on the way home from elsewhere. We get a little high and they stay until almost midnight, and my mood stays good for days.

So many lives I’d like to lead, to have led, spinning off in all directions, the multiverse inside my head, fueled by curiosity and indulgence, pleasure and sloth, love and more love and more love.

A drive to be both fully in the moment and wholly out of time.