I wrote a novel after seeing a full moon inside a halo of pale light, and lines of cloud around and through it, some waved, some gently curving.

I was born in a sack of amniotic fluid, turned to flesh by a miracle and my mother’s blood. The blood she gave me was a lubricant and a blessing. I thought I was part of her first, then thought I was different. That was the source of a never to cease confusion.

The things I know to be true are that I am often wrong and that I’m going to die. Otherwise, I can’t know or honestly say what is right or wrong, true or false, what love is, other than mother, what is real or illusion and what it is to die, though I know it will happen.

Critics attacked the work I did to see things naturally at least and write it down. None discussed death, because each of us is alone and naked.

I finished that novel in a summer dawn, the wakening sky bleeding scarlet to diaphanous pink on a robin’s egg blue canvas. Velvet cloud piles turned to ash above a pencil-sketched, grey if anything curve of horizon flecked with gold. The moon was pale and fading but still insistent on its value in a remnant of celestial blue on the far side of my sight. It hung aloof well above the burst of blindness that passed my face and shoulders. That was the morning, a movement from apprehension to being bound by time.

Not a word did I say or think as that light renewed me then chained me down with a new birth cord to a world that would never change. Nor cursed but accepted it all as I had written.