(Or, On Being Ill and Waiting for the Diagnosis, and in the Meantime Feeling Like Shit)
Michigan is not a state of mind but of America, though it is perhaps exemplary of the state of America. I am in a state here, experiencing a side of myself that has opted for intractability and wariness, resisting love––and yet––love! Love is a state I have experienced and yet still long for, in all its grandeur and elusiveness.
I am amazed and humbled by the extraordinary lengths to which we will go, to prove our fealty to the world, and to prove our independence of it. I am vexed. I am awed. Love what is here, says the wiser part of myself, speaking from the unreliable realm of dreams. Endure the evisceration and embrace the passions that stir, reluctant or with enthusiasm, from the warm layer of earth from which we spring, and which we abjure, longingly.
All of which is to say: the robin's song at dusk, the peepers singing from the lake. Who wants to give them up? | 
