Passing through
With eyes straining upward, squinting at the shards of pale blue sky that pierce through the tangled canopy of maple and sycamore, you lose your way among your thoughts for so long that your body is left behind, left abandoned, left to sway– ever so slightly– with the wind.
For a brief moment you’re aware of the feeling of your feet sinking through the carpet of leaves and twigs and debris, and into the mud below. But this awareness quickly passes, and you’re no longer cognizant of anything outside of your own mind.
It’s all so familiar. Yet… no, no, it’s not quite what it was. Or rather the feeling isn’t what it was. At least I don’t think so.
I’m the same person I was then. And this place hasn’t changed a bit. But something is different.
You had merely been passing through here on your way to somewhere else. But you can no longer remember what errand had seemed so important before you were struck motionless, unable to explain your own wet eyes and halted breathing.
You feel with absolute certainty that this place had been waiting for you, just as surely as you now feel that you had been waiting for this place. If pressed (though you’d never been pressed), you would have said that you had been done here. Nothing left to see, nothing left to do. But now the silence that rushes in to fill the empty spaces around you assumes the gravity of the pause in a conversation that implies that the other is waiting for a response. From you.
E pluribus
There are many of you– more all the time. But to me, you are but one.
You are the predecessor. The one who came before, and who broke all that I now must fix. The one who now exists only in what was left behind.
You don’t know me, but I know you better all the time.
Over and over, I am haunted by the shadow you cast on the wall. I avert my eyes downward, only to see that I am again walking in your hasty, reckless footsteps.
You are many, to be sure. Too many to count. But I know you.