How I love Stephen King

This is an excerpt from "The Langoliers" in "Four Past Midnight"......


Deep in the trenches carved into the floors of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, there are fish which live and die without ever seeing or sensing the sun. These fabulous creatures cruise the depths like ghostly balloons, lit from within by their own radiance. Although they look delicate, they are actually marvels of biological design, built to withstand pressures that would squash a man as flat as a windowpane in the blink of an eye. Their great strength, however, is also their great weakness. Prisoners of their own alien bodies, they are locked forever in their dark depths. If they are captured and drawn toward the surface, toward the sun, they simply explode. It is not external pressure that destroys them, it its absence.


I just re-read that a few days ago and remembered how much that stuck with me from the first time I read it. I used to totally understand what that character (the one like the fish) felt, since I couldn't live without that pressure.

Now, I can't imagine living with it. Ever again.

It's moments like that that truly make all the changes sink in.

All those changes used to feel so alien to me. All of it, every day, I felt like someone else was calling the shots and deciding things for me. Nothing felt like it fit right in my head. I am finally to the point where there are only a few things that feel like they don't fit right. Looking back on the way things used to be, THAT feels alien to me now.

I am so thankful.