the gap between what one is and what one must be to live. what it's like to live in that gap. 

i read that in an interview with ursula leguin, and that makes me sorry i saw merely the external aspect of science fiction and couldn't get to the inside. is death like a melting and a revealing, does it somehow open an artist's life? i'm nearly finished with the ghost dance book. i think i'm ready for ursula. 

does an artist who makes what they want manage to be what one is and also live that life? sometimes i feel like i could, and then days when i'm tired, most days, i think that's just my wish, and my will when i'm strengthened. but it falls away like ice, and i'm a shivery bony thing exposed to the wind. it's only the illusion of spring. and i'm no artist, just a hunger with legs. i'm a bony ghost.

when i looked at the ice monster i couldn't imagine what shape being would live inside that heavy body of ice. i knew there was a skeleton, and the skeleton was the original being, and the skeleton was the real body, and i worried it would be shattered by the ice monster it wore.

and the little tree remembers though it couldn't see what it was before.