Le retour

I haven’t been truly happy since I left that place.

That’s not true, of course. It was never true; I left before I was ready to leave (there didn’t seem to be a choice at the time), and it wasn’t long before the bad and the mundane and the melancholy all began to fade, leaving nothing but fond memories. What’s more, these retouched memories and the location where they occurred became entwined and confused until the version of the place that existed in my mind no longer bore any resemblance to anywhere on this earth.

What present could ever compare to that past?

As time passed and I remained unable to return — there was always some obstacle, real or otherwise, standing between me and this home I longed for — I gradually began to realize how I’d been fooling myself. There would never be a return to that place, because the moment I left and my experience there ended, it ceased to exist. There was nothing to go back to.

That’s when the longing to return began to diminish. Perhaps the memories, fictitious or not, should be left alone. Kept safe. Perhaps they couldn’t survive a return trip and the confrontation with reality that would cause anyway. And so with time I thought less and less of returning.

Until the morning I was informed that I would be doing just that.

Until next time

What’s it been, days? Weeks? Surely not months, right?

It was still summer then, wasn’t it? I suppose it was longer ago than I’d thought. Yes, the wind that came billowing in from the lake was still warm. Warmer than now, at least. My arms were uncovered, my skin absorbing the sun and the smells of grass and sand and water.

There were hints of autumn—too faint to hear, too dim to see. But they were there.

I couldn’t have been the only one who knew there wouldn’t be many more days like this; there were others around me whom I couldn’t help but to think had been called there by the same voice that called me. But far fewer than there had once been. We were sparse, and no one was close enough to recognize my face (if they had known me) or speak to me without shouting (if they had wanted to say anything to me).

And though there were others (a few here, a few there), the wind rushed in around us, filling our ears, wrapping us completely, isolating us all from each other. Yawns, sneezes, and sighs were swept up and blown away before anyone could hear them. Dust from beyond the horizon pelted our faces, made us squint, encouraged us to keep our eyes on our feet.

There were others there, maybe, but they might as well have been miles away.

I just needed something good

But that was great.

These thoughts aren’t your own

In whom do you confide that you can’t confide in anyone anymore?

And the moral is:

There isn’t always a moral to be found.

We stand to lose so much when we devote ourselves too entirely to seeking answers that don’t exist. But maybe I should speak for myself; maybe you haven’t made a habit of looking for reasons where there are none. Sometimes a tale winds its way from beginning to middle to end without teaching us a single thing. And that needn’t be unsettling, right?

If not this

Don’t feel bad for getting what you wanted.

Or rather, don’t feel bad that it hasn’t made you happy. There can be some comfort in being wrong.

I’ve done it again

While wandering about, I managed to stumble into one of those places that seem nearly impossible to exit. You know the kind. They look so harmless from the outside, so much so that you never think twice about entering. Once you do, you immediately realize this is clearly not the place you’d been looking for, and so you turn around to leave, and…

Where did that door run off to?

Next thing you know, the only definitive statement you can make about time is that too much of it has passed since you arrived here.

Running out of questions

Now that would be the scariest.

A mouthful of glass

Most of the time, it’s just too much.

Too much to notice, too much to sense, too much to appreciate, too much to experience, too much to remember. At times, you think it’s a shame. Other times, you realize it’s a necessity; let your sleeping mind do its pitiful best to sort out the infinite abundance of forgotten moments so you can hope to catch the ones that matter before they pass you by.

A sieve in the river.

But there are moments– exceedingly rare moments– when everything snaps into focus around you. Time halts. Suddenly, nothing stands a chance of escaping your attention or your memory. In a flash, the present is severed from the past.

Then time resumes as though you’d never owned it.

Pulling the plug

The words coalesced into fully-formed phrases before you ever had a chance to write them down. So when the opportunity arrived to commit them to paper (at last!), you had no need for hesitation or deliberation; the words were made real as fast as your hand could make them so. It was as though you had unplugged a drain from the bottom of the pool of your thoughts, allowing them to gush through, and then…

And then.

The words that had threatened to tear you apart at the seams have now all been expelled, and yet you know you’re not empty. You know you’re not done.

Tap your sweaty fingertips on the desk, take a drink from the glass you’d forgotten was sharing the table with you, gaze blankly around you with faintly stinging eyes, and wonder: do you feel compelled to continue because something under the surface demands to be expressed? Or are you just in the mood to drag your pen across paper?