Beginning, Middle, End.

This morning, half asleep, I wander from bedroom to living room to kitchen to flip on the teapot and here is what I see. It's all I can tell you, what I see.

My son stretched out on the blue linen couch watching music videos on TV. The couch is soft and holds him like a cloud, puffy around him. I bought it because it had big soft cushions and was very long and deep from front to back so anyone with insomnia could find it a safe haven.

The music video has the face of a young boy longing, stroking his guitar, below belt level, then flashes to the object of his desire, a long sinewy girl, brunette, striding on a beach next to a boardwalk and chicken wire fence, basketball played on the other side. She is in a red cotton dress that is long and flowing.

He wants her. He longs for her. Any fool can see.

We want to mate, we alive people. Later, it will be enough, mating, and then we'll die. But in the meantime, we long for one another.

The girl in the music video is not easy to catch. It's a good game. She strides along, slips away, disappears, reappears, he strokes his guitar as he longs for her and trying to come up with a plan to trap her.

Fornication makes us crude, but angelic. It's something we do dumbly and divinely. Kings and queens do it, giving birth to little history books of civilization.

It's hard to write a story without a little mating tossed in. It's a plot we all get. A place the world begins -- longing -- and ends.

I smell the tea explode in my kitchen -- a small explosion of tea perfume and the far-away odor of tearooms and tea leaves and London at 7:00am and half-and-half, maybe lemon, maybe sugar -- and feel we can make it through another day of this life. That's all I want to show you, just this life.

Crossing from kitchen to bath, my son is looking at a show called "Cribs" where a very tall, very rich basketball star is showing off his mansion. He holds up a picture of himself, "look how young and sexy I looked," he says laughing at himself.

I'm running a bath and squeeze a rosy pink bubble bath gel into the water in a swirl, overwhelming the tea fragrance. This bubbly cloud bath is my favorite vehicle of entry to a day. Lightens and brightens things up.

After the bath, I might be ready for the meat of life being set on a table before me. I wish I could show you all of it -- the cars on the street that could strike me if I don't make haste, the tears of a little kid at my son's school, the way the vanilla frosting sits peaked and proud on the top of cake in a bakery shop window.

Like a river, I want to bend down, reach through that plate glass window and grab handfuls of this flood of color and light and life to show you. Maybe you and I can sort it out. I want you to explain it to me, please, read the code and translate it, I just don't get it many days.

But in the end, when I hold it all up for you to see, I pour it into your hands, that full flood of frosting and cars and moonlight and legs and teacups, there's nothing -- it's gone. It's all leaked out between my fingers, absolutely nothing there to show, save the mystery, and your two hands, and so I take them and we walk together.

I hope your longing and mine might make a path and let us tick tick tick tock our days away down a little street, our feet clicking away the time, making up some story, with Beginning, Middle, and of course, don't get teary, End, where a light in a window glows, but then goes out.