The Gap

Perhaps according to one man, if he ever pauses, it feels like death to him. Here’s the fear: time is given to us, and we take from it until we disappear into an overworked and overly simplistic form. Someone on one side of a door, someone on another, and I can’t pause right now because I’m in a rush and there are forty million things to do. This layering of space upon space, the stacking of horizon upon horizon reaches a further crescendo outdoors at night with no flashlight on because I can see better that way, the stars so sharp and crystalline, my breath turned under and hemmed, smoothing out the once raw edge of my imaginings.

Maybe it doesn’t matter who remembers what, as long as someone remembers something. I see you through the window, sitting beside the lamp and you are like a faraway picture within a frame of blackness. It is disquieting to look at you, in through the window, and know that you don’t know I can see you. Why, I wonder, couldn’t something else be happening? It’s as if I don’t exist, or as if you do.

Rough Welcome

Perhaps time doesn’t show its face until the very end. Just another thing ending forever. All becomes a fluid gossiping about change and exchange, properly or property, as a dog in the corner of the yard hobbling on three legs becomes a metaphor for all we’ve lost, for the gigantic harm that has thrown us all off balance completely.

Maybe it is difficult to know what is happening to us. Too difficult to stay and learn what comes next, so we set out on a perimeter path, completing our circuit back toward parked cars.  As we drive, I hold the words for what I know in my head even as my heart fills with a grief greater than what I can manage. The speed of the car makes me nervous. There is a moment, when listening to a sound repeat itself, when one can either give in or begin to panic.

Yes, maybe, mostly

Perhaps the only way to escape our fate is not to know it. What is fate, after all? A scaffolding, torn down to discover what is growing underneath?  Remembering a song we’ve never heard before? One minute receiving flowers, the next minute pricked by a thorn? Feeling a deep upsurge of love for someone, until a moment later it's just a memory?

Maybe however close we come, we are always strangers to our fate. We can embrace it, but there is never a chance of coming any closer, since at the moment we meet our fate we have already changed. In the friend there is the stranger, and in the stranger the friend, and by the time I say I love you any feelings of affection I may have had for you may have disappeared completely.