The World Book

Before the threshold, everything felt theoretical — maps of a country no one had yet entered, blueprints for a house still unmixed from its clay. Now the door stands open, and the air coming through carries a charge that wasn't there yesterday. Something is beginning. Not slowly, not gently, but with the particular violence of a thing that has been held too long at the edge. Sleep comes late when the mind refuses to stop measuring what it stands to lose, and gain, and become.