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?

… and two steps back

We had been so close.

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.

And just like that

Another wave of nostalgia has overtaken me… with no warning!

Well, unless you count the unwaveringly frequent occurrence of this phenomenon as some kind of warning.

X marks the spot

I know it seems silly to attach so much significance to anything as fleeting and as brief as the moment when our paths crossed. (And yes, it really was just a single moment. Hard to believe, isn’t it?)

Hello and goodbye, it’s nice to meet you and it was nice to have met you– all of it a blur, and all of it at once.

And yet.

You look different

New haircut? Lose weight? New clothes? Get a tan? Clip your nails? Whiten your teeth in three easy steps?

No, you insist, you’ve done nothing. Nothing’s changed, other than perhaps my perception.

Fine. But you still look different.

What’s with all the questions?

I mean, seriously.

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve been further even more decided to use even go need to do look more as anyone can. Can you really be far even as decided half as much to use go wish for that? My guess is that when one really been far even as decided once to use even go want, it is then that he has really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like. It’s just common sense.