Awoken on a shiver after having slept the entire winter, only to find that I could not recall any of my dreams. The light creeps through the blinds and I lift the window to let a little air in. slowly, glimpses of the life I’ve led begin to present themselves to me; in fragments, like torn photographs....my memories scattered about on the lowest stratum of my unconscious...they take flight towards the surface of my mind in momentary leaps powered by the subtlest gusts of spring winds. And then I can not help but wonder if there's something wrong with the way I perceive time; with the way my mind experiences temporal living. For this feeling of displacement and disconnection from the months in my recent past is much stronger than its ever been. Perhaps this is merely one of the perks of maturation….the complacency just seems strange when I reflect upon it...I try to not let the implications of it sadden me.
I look in the mirror to a see an unkempt beard and two grey eyes staring back at me. Sunken eyes that with every day I look a little older, recognize me less. For I am always a boy in the deepest pits of who I am. Not quite as determined as Freud would like to believe; not merely some mechanistic robot responding to drives that have been affected by previous lives of mine. But there I am always as a boy behind my eyes, and in my mind-in the field with a baseball glove in hand and a beating heart; and in those thoughts the sun is most definitely shining. But there I stand today, reflected in a mirror in a dimly lit bathroom in a basement at a university I've spent five years attending with only seconds left 'til my last departure. There I am now; looking a little less enthused and a lot more tired. Cliche to say we are always children; but the very proof lies perhaps in the testimony that so many have felt the need to present this articulation...explaining this tragedy as a child whose locked inside some decaying vessel...
I am ridden with shame once again today. For the recognition of my inability to live a non-contradictory existence. I am alone in myself, and its deeper than ever. But I frolic in these fields of mine while the fire scorches the earth around me and soars into the night sky. Here in this burning-I am mine. It’s the rest of it that hurts me so-the time when the world is grabbing at me that I feel my skin being pulled in every different direction. For, there she is with her needs, and here I am with mine. This is the greatest paradox of them all perhaps; though aren’t they all quite great!...a joke it may seem, but of course, every comedy is a tragedy at heart; I don’t know any other way out but to ground myself in this ugly piece of art as some pathos filled clown.

I told her I once lived for the possession of pretty memories and that living that way led to anxiety and a feeling of hollowness. That over the past year I had forgotten to live like that; she took this as a compliment; rightfully so. Finally there was meaning in the present tense, and for the first time in a long time, he recognized that he was at least capable of momentarily being swept away with the tide. No longer completely leading a life concerned only with leaving an impression of himself upon others that he could accept upon reflection; perhaps the avoidance of the feeling of regret was truly the fear he initially obeyed. But either way, he had arrived at a place where there was nothing staring back at him when he held his eyes open wide.... for the thought that it would all become some broken memory laying on a basement floor had stolen the meaning in the feeling of the present right out from under him. He recognized, sitting there across from her that he was alive in these moments in a way that time had never allowed him to be-.....but as I begin to allow myself to articulate what I am thinking I begin to worry about losing possession of the inexpressible meaning that accompanies only immediate experience. When I start to walk in this direction towards reflective possession-the world begins to assume a familiar shade of grey that I have not lived within in a while. Its funny though for I am happy in the saddest of ways when my brain is actively processing and grabbing at my surroundings as a memory making machine....Making things my own; it is the will to do this that I wish to overcome-maybe the maker will show me the movie for what he meant by it.

--

But then, like some divine test of my ability to keep promises I once made to God- I stay late to finish my work. Perhaps in honesty, not why I truly stayed at all and perhaps I was seeking sin from the very first moment she popped into my perception last October-then she was a girl with a boy; an argument ensuing outside of our class and I overheard her say the words, "Just stay!"...A tall kid with brown hair upset opted to leave....from this sight the theif within me became intrigued. ...tonight, I stayed to work on a paper...probably for more for than anything, in acknowledgement of the underlying awareness that strickens me that her and I could never walk home together with only one set of keys. Here I am sitting at a desk I thought-after having used her again like some heartless man… And there sitting, of all people; the one who sat so proudly in that chair I had labeled in my mind many months ago. Did I know this would be the case, that she would be sitting there…. But so late on a Friday night? Still at the library. And oh, what luck struck upon me to see them walking over to me with a smile on their face. Asking me the question I hadn't the nerve to approach them to ask... when I had seen them there thinking away without noticing me. Oh, how kind of you to come walking over to me....
If two people stand aloof then the point is simple-nothing will ever take place but unjustified heart ache. And now, look at the two of us dancing around in my memory, what a pretty scene to me the two of us tightrope walking my bones, with a dangerous future that only I have had the pleasure to foresee and hold. There you are in mind, and I can only wonder if I am at all in yours-and today there was nothing to constitute a 'we' between you and me. Seeking this unity is the only drive I know how to care about now…..But, time plays funny tricks, like a magician of today who waves his hanker over our hands while were holding our most prized possessions, to laugh wickedly while he sends them vanishing into the oblivion of yesterday. Days later your image shall fade and the outline of your face shall become but a vestigial tracing at best….yet I’ll long to look upon the shape that memory renders a mystery within me-for my heart’s anxiety will be the only assurance for me that you remain an interesting and intelligent angel…

Clementine-the contradiction that I am; this is life. I can only say I am sorry for being human. For not a year ago I cursed my perspective that needed to remember and hold pretty thoughts in his head instead of pretty things in his hands in order to feel that he was truly grasping them. And, tonight I am tempted to return to the land from which my wish to abandon has already been granted. And you were the angel who granted me my divine wish; I even prayed for you once....and here I am now; longing to return to a lonely world of memories of pretty things....and then there you are. the one my body knows how to love, staring back at me. What can I do but wonder now what you think of me.