Wednesday, July 29, 2009

A Memoir for a Brief Moment


The river runs far enough for me to imagine it being endless. My mind travels off, as my eyes become useless in a moment as I see each drop of water move through its life cycle, from the ocean, to the sky, to the ground, and how it may never see this valley again.
In the spirit of memoir, I think of memories as brighter than they were when they were realities I could touch. I think of my memories of the Hawai'ian landscape and how beautiful it is, and how my mind works to preserve the most attractive features. In a far different realm, of being there, I see a different landscape. Nothing has changed, just the viewer, and even that change doesn't feel significant as I look at what I constantly leave and return to. In my dreams this place is the ground I walk, and yet I am walking those very grounds in my waking hour seeing nothing special, as I carry on as if it were normal. I am the fat of the tourist, the off-set pattern of a visitor, and blind just as justice with my eyes in disregard to what surrounds me. This is paradise, a voice of rationale speaks, and I yet this is just another place I try to adjust and fit in, hoping to find something that resembles "home" here.
An alien hovers over the landscape, scanning it for new land to camp on its escape from the outer worlds.
Shattered in this world of early and silent evenings I think of memories of the place I left. Tonight and many nights before the glimmer of her appears, and fades gradually, taking its time and cursing me in terms of lost. I can't escape you, I whisper in my restlessness, and soon even I find sleep, dreaming of starry nights, and ladies of fantasy.
In the unfamiliar morning, it's been two weeks and it still feels like noon, I awake to meet an overcast sky, and a higher peak in the wind. The coffee is all gone, and I don't feel like shaving, biking, or even leaving the house, I want to be a bum. I can't remember what I did soon after, eventually I ended up going back to sleep and woke up in the afternoon, and felt the same. There was no reset button to this mood, and so I just wandered the house my father built, and contemplated a list of things in my life that are either important or irrelevant, I couldn't speak for their importance because I tend to favor useless traps of time, or other bottomless pits.
It has only been few days after a moment of clarity, and my rehabilitation, recovering from matters that have dissolved from significance or mention, is still fresh and fragile, like the wings of a moth.
I remember very clearly one thing I learned from all the years of education I went through, and it was, you got one life, who cares what others think and do, what you do is all that matters, in my terrible paraphrase of Nietzsche. I keep telling myself to jump on that train, and I'm either too afraid to drop everything that has provided comfort, or I simply feel I am not strong enough. I kick myself, telling myself I am strong, and reflect on all the things I have lived through, how I have cheated death, crime, lived through much heartbreak, and failure. And yet here I sit, holding my chair with two square cheeks resistant to change. It isn't fear, it's laziness. And now that I realize my problem I hope to give birth to change.
Tomorrow, I say in all my clarity, is going to be different. And in a shimmer of hope, I believe it will.

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