This and That

I didn’t mind the afternoon, rinsed by summer rain. Walking back from lunch, the ground creased by small lakes--numerous as the sky with stars, I ruminated on the past. I turned it over and over again in my mind, polishing it like a stone. When I was done, I saw that it bore no resemblance to anything that had ever happened to me, that it was instead, something new. After this gesture, I was exhausted and, like all creators, I rested. The sky was pink now, awash in clouds.

I knew that I must carefully study the past because it would have such a resemblance to the future. Some days I would be happy and laugh and drink and tell long digressive stories with friends, shake the dregs from the bottom of wine bottles and recount the good old days and the good old days to come; others, I would drink tea with a raw throat and complain of my sickness, the weather, age, and misfortune, still others would see me slumped on a brown couch cushion moving my fingers in an attempt at construction with a meager offering of words. Sometimes, the past seems to be happening now.

I have some things in common with flowers. I don’t regret the days that I have spent turned towards the sun, rimmed in strands of light. The flowers, who are deeply committed to this symmetry, keep burying their roots deeper and deeper as time too, stretches across the universe deeper and deeper, unraveling instead, like a spool of thread. This is where commonalities between myself and flowers begin to go awry. The flowers will die soon, and I intend to live for decades and decades, sipping that tea, watching the steam curl above gnarled old hands, useless hands, hands that have toiled on this earth and been greeted only by thistles and thorns.

The strangest thing about memory is the smell of freshly mown grass, warm young bodies post-coitally aglow, a flock of geese showing off in a perfect V. Below, we see only the embers of light attached to their white feathers, molten gold. I mean only to point to the exigencies of life, of memory. How strange that I remember certain afternoons with piercing clarity while years and years are lost to me. How strange, how chaotic. Let us take flight then, like the geese. Let us travel to a place that is nothing like this, a place where we can absent ourselves from mirrors, lakes, memories and lovers, where our thoughts are strung across the sky like a fledgling phoenix: young and bright and fierce.