I saw her striding through the cafe today and caught something in her face, something strange, something macabre—the face of her mother.
Suddenly I can see what she will look like in the future,
I can see what it is she carries of age in her genes.
It’s a shock to see it in her like this—she’s always been so indelibly springy and youthful.
It's the appearance of the beast--Garden of Eden one day, drowning in the deluging flood the next.
Seeing the future of the present.
Seeing the past in the present.
Seeing the present as if it's real.
And it all comes flooding back.
More than is civil or good, I think.
Yes, intolerable.
Drowning in a sentimental deluge.
I leap back.
I inhabit it so easily.
There's no continuous flow—but that's not necessary.
I remember the bits, the parts, the disconnected parts, those spots of time.
And they’re strong and foundational.
I want to relive it all, and scent it again, and feel it again, and feel all that I imagine was beyond it again.
Oh, yes, I'm blown back into it, that past time; I want it all again.
I want to run about, and swim, and listen, and fail to hear, and see those clothes again, and feel those textures again, and those kisses, and those unknown tensions, and all that un-knowingness, and wide-eyedness, and naivety, and unfounded novelty.
Oh, what it was like to have so little history!
To touch skin—the skin of another; to know the form of another.
The closeness of eyes.
Looking behind their blueness.
The novelty of it all.
Impossible to forget.
And so easily yearned for.
I wonder sometimes, if death will bring it on again?
Will I one day pass behind some veil and see it all, be it all again—trapped within an eternal cycle of being again.
But I would surely tire of it—one life is enough if well lived.
So, opinion-less I set out tomorrow to capture the good and live easily without the bad.
She, the girl in the café, abides in my mind—and the dreadful image of her mother.
But it is nothing to me again.
It has passed as all things.
What a bloody business this living thing is.
