Spring again... the birds, or the psalmists among them, have not been much bothered by whatever hit us — perhaps they do not consider themselves to have been hit. They pour out their song as of old, bodying forth the mornings of creation. Their dawn choiring invokes my earliest memories: I entered this world in deepest winter, and every year this music echoes the first spring of my life, born as it is out of profound silence, as was I.

Making out the number of each type among their voices, their density within the hemisphere of how far I can hear, the fearlessness of their full-bodied clamor — I know that spring has settled in, and whatever brief reversals may yet come, winter will not return.

I imagine the Boy recording this music in his consiousness for a similar retrieval years from now, on just such a morning — if whatever hit us is through hitting us, a question not yet settled. I will never know its answer, though my ghost may learn it, as it travels on with the Boy when he leaves whatever's left of me behind, a ship arcing away from its home world.

Lovely image, lovely how it feels in the mind's mouth, but it makes too much of me: I'm just the Boy's Companion, not his World; he has plenty of friends, whereas I have none other. Every thing in the world is his friend, or at least someone worthy of his regard and an invitation to play. No objects in his world, only persons.

Now I'm using the Boy in the very way I deplore, as an object of cogitation. Well, not him; his ghost. It's disrespectful and false, but it's a harmless pastime for an old dotard who, in his decrepitude, is incapable of accomplishing anything else. Besides, the ghosts deserve no better.