All of life is a series of fragments. It comes to you in pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle, that you put together until it forms something of a whole.

Cold to warm, hungry to fed, alone to held — the need and definition of that whole will expand and complicate over time, such as it is.

But part by part, I have found this to be more or less true.

When it wasn’t enough, I invented what I needed. And when it was, I sang myself up into the stars. Isn’t that living? The poets say it is.

Now I am, at 42, an ocean. Internally, I am awash with just that volume of ideas thoughts memories experiences conversations and people that swim like fish around coral reefs of once-was.

I deleted nothing. It’s all here. In shorthand — possibly, cramped and rolled like paired socks fresh from the laundry, wedged firmly in a dry drawer that smells like cedar. But here.

In childhood, when we learn to write, we write so big. It takes years for our handwriting, like our gait, to compress and steady itself. (Interesting that it’s at the very end of the spectrum — the elderly, trembling years — when the writing grows large again, as if to admit all that composure was not enough.) And here I am at dead center, even precision, perfect balance, firm hand.

I know what I know.

I’ve devoured poetry and literature with only a fond hunger for company, to know other people sought translation with an appetite to match my own. Thank God they took notes. I eat those pages in earnest.

To merely live, to exist, is not enough. I am not so much breathing, as burning. This world must be transfigured through us, else we fail utterly.

My puzzle, as it takes form before me, is the face of unconditional love. It suggests that to love is to love without thought of receiving, that to love is to love and live with what may at times feel to be unendurable loss.

But to truly love is to love transcending all these earthly subtractions, regardless, because it is the only path with meaning, and the only path that leads to more love for others in the end.

I write this, in the elegant hand of medium age, being neither too young nor too old to abandon my composure. I’ve traveled enough to navigate my way home by the stars. And I do, in this instance, know what I know.