Everywhere I look my eyes find something new, more intriguing than the last, to settle on, if only for an instant. Rapid fire attention span. Eyes like a camera lens they zoom in and out, finding macro focus on trivial things like dust balls, ripped seams, and chipped paint. The fibers, the stretched threads, the linear peels that reveal choices, layers, of the past. The slightly less-than-crisp white gives way to shades of dutch-boy blue, and what appears to be hunter green.
As I sit in stillness I find my mind lurching forward. A time hop appears, reminding me of days gone by, and sweaters that still hang in my too-cramped closet. All it takes is one snapshot of the past to send me bunny hopping down the rabbit hole. How many nights did we find ourselves in a dizzy of powder, and perfume, with places to go, but only choosing home? Grab the keys and go. Aren’t we all chasing one high or another? A crisp white start, fresh and new, full of promise. Eager, heart-racing, palm-sweating excitement. In the search for created chaos, we start out so neat, and linear. Glassy reflections of stories both told, and untold. With one fell blow, the merry-go-round begins.
But as the dilation recedes, the flurry of excitement to enter the, well-known unknown, begins to fade. I sit immobile while images of my past, and present, twirl and collide like one of those wind-up lullaby mobiles hung above cribs. A similar soothing effect takes place. As the images continue to spin, I find the past and present overlapping in ways I had not seen before. Nights I thought I craved, missed, now seem like the ripped seams. What was once a novelty has given way to circumstance, and repetition. Something new, done over and over, can only remain new for so long. The spinning begins to slow, the soundtrack of distant memories begins to melt to white noise. All the nights of seeking, and being sought out, for one thing or another, I let the dust of those memories delicately settle. Leaving a soft map of places I used to go, questions I used to seek answers to, choices made and lessons learned.. they all leave their subtle trace.
Now the questions I ask, and the answers I seek, focus on more of a permanent high, rather than just the next 15 minutes. I relish my past for getting me to where I am. Shaking the dust off of memories, casts a new light of understanding on them. I realize I’ll never lose those nights that made my head spin, and heart thud. I’ll still have head-spinning, heart-thudding nights, the cause for them will just be something more substantial.
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