How Long?

I think I have not slept since I was 12 or so. What I have done night by night is something other than sleep. I have lain down for a moment, hidden myself, escaped for a time.

How long since a morning has simply come upon me, wandered in through the window at its own leisure? How long since it mattered what the robin and the bumblebee had to say? What has become of the kisses of my mother, of the ease of joy, of the daily conspiracy of every thing and every creature to remake the hours in all the fullness of purpose?

How long since life has mattered like that?

There comes a time--who knows how or when--that finds both waking and sleeping diminished, a time wherein what is merely memory is found to have superseded miracle.

And the loneliness is enough to kill.

My life becomes a continual hungering after that which has already been swallowed and digested. What food can there be in the world for the feeding of empty spaces?

Time passes, and does not make us wise. Time passes, and in its passage we become more and more what we have made than what we are. What is left of original essence is found in the teardrop, contained in the blank stare, wrapped up in the fitful dream.

No More I Love Yous

I happened to hear a song on the radio this morning--Annie Lennox singing "No More I Love Yous"--and it instantly called forth the period of time just after I had broken up with Jamie, back in 2005. Isn't it odd how music can serve in this sort of mnemonic way, calling forth a sort of encapsulated essence of a certain time? It is more than remembering, recalling details or facts. It is the retrieval of a complex aura of feeling, so whole and accurate in itself that it can actually make your heart ache. In fact, one does not so much recall as he suddenly re experiences. It is not that one remembers and then explores what he remembers; rather, memory comes upon him, more in the manner of revelation. What arrives has not been called forth, but sent.

Strange world, this. Stranger yet the individual in it.

Have you ever smelled something, or caught a glance of something, or heard a sound, and found yourself instantly transported to the very core of another time and place? Suddenly you are five, or twenty-five; suddenly you are in a meadow by a river; suddenly you are sitting with your mother and the Cocker Spaniel on the back porch on a summer day regardless of these many years since they have died.

You smell something--something unnameable, and yet intact, complete--and you are suddenly beside your brother's hospital bed, holding his hand as his life slips away.

You hear a song, this voice, this pitch, and you relive how your heart sank so low, how your breath grew so short, how your soul reached then to the empty air where she had been. You can almost smell her skin again, you can almost touch her hair.

Strange world, strange world. Stranger yet the individual, this man, this woman, this perpetual child whispering well wishes in eternity to the unending cosmos.

Nothing whatsoever has been lost. Nothing ever comes to an end. People only imagine it so.

A Race Against Time

Though I grow old, though I become ill, though the endurance of youth has been traded unequally to the years, I find yet that I have just barely begun in life. I find myself, much surprised, not with paced gait on the final turns, but back under the starting gun, still in the blocks, anxious, pressed, and most of all impatient. Everything to this point had been training, had been practice, and now the real race is about to begin.

I look back and realize that my life has been a serious of false starts. I find that I often ran blindly, or ran without confidence, or ran without poise. There were times when the finish line was not worth the race, and there were times when my effort was not equal to the goal.

And so I begin again--though this time, this last time, the course to be run has changed. It is shorter, it it straighter, and its limits are not only of length, but of time.

It is a race against time. But time to do what?

Something, anything, everything.

There are a million things to do, a million people to meet, a million places to see, a million ends to be tied and a million knots to be freed. I have wasted far too much time, not knowing how short time would turn out to be.

And yet I could not until now have run with the same assurance, an assurance of good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over. To take, at this point, the merest thing for granted would seem a luxury open only to the young and the well.

One thing more about the course shall I mention. There is not now a single competitor to be seen. No, not one; though there be countless companions by my side.

For All That It Matters

Today is my brother's birthday. He would have been 57. He died 27 years ago of cancer. That's a long time ago. Yet almost like yesterday. So defined is he now by death, that I cannot imagine him being alive at 57. It just does not fit. It seems somehow not so sad as proper. And I think he's happy this way. What is a birthday in the aspect of eternity? Such things are for worldly amusement only, and do not translate beyond time's circumstantial kingdom.