April rivers - only young once
I can feel the time running like liquid through my fingers. Like a river, it keeps the same shape, but always moving.
A few days back I read myself the stories I read my archive from last April. I was impressed by the efforts of my then-self to record and collect the pieces of the world I thought I saw shattering around me for my future self, or for anyone who'd come wondering where I'd been. When the world shatters, the light catches the edges.
Perhaps things are more beautiful when one is aware of expending life. Or perhaps an awareness of dying makes one try more vitally at living, and this trying is more keenly observant.
Perhaps in a pit, one tries harder to see, and is more grateful to find, the stars.
People told me then that the images were beautiful. I could see then where they might be coming from. Reading back now, I see it more. But I remember writing them. I see the titles paired with each post and read from their doublespeak the messages I left for myself. It reads now almost as two separate narrations.
My impression of it now is like the dancing lights that come with a blow to the head. Reeling at the time, now I hardly remember. But, the lights were beautiful. I described the lights.
I am glad to have moved on (I cannot adequately describe the difference between these last two aprils). I recall thinking to myself a few weeks ago, walking under the cushion-like light surrounding Elliot circle at night, that I felt sane, and it felt nice.
But I haven't felt the knife-edge of the world in the balls of my feet as sharply or as frequently. Perhaps I am no longer trying so well or intently to lean out beyond the present. Through the kaleidoscope of images, there runs a thread of trying, which I find myself admiring now, though at the time I remember feeling only that I was unable to tighten my fists enough around the thread, feeling it run through my raw hands.
I still have too many pieces.
I need to let these concepts roll back into a ball. I want to be able to feel and understand without feeling like having to consciously enumerate the components of an experience. Some dissections are not useful or meaningful.
Earlier this month, I re-visited a river briefly. Over a year since I'd been there.
My brother sent me a hope. We lend hopes to each other, trading them back when they are needed elsewhere.
I hope that you can live like a river and continue to flow while coming to a swirling equilibrium with your contents and incoming silt deposits and runoff, sorting and smoothing them into soft pebbles and sandy shores.
****
My favorite time of day lately has been near-sunset. My favorite season is fall. I'm becoming more convinced these things are more beautiful, the colors richer, because inevitable change makes them seem dearer.
When I was young, my father gave me wine to taste and I was overwhelmed by the odor filling my mouth. I did not understand how he could enjoy the taste. He said in his father-to-child voice that he can appreciate wine probably be cause he's killed off enough tastebuds.
Whenever my Chinese professor tells a story, the moral is usually about the best uses of youthfulness: "Play Hard while you can!" (despite the fact that playing hard probably contributes to its vanishing.
Recently,
I began to wonder - though I we may mourn the loss of youthfulness and of tastebuds and many other things that, like candles, expend themselves by their intended use, what are the things that one can only really appreciate, having first lost something else? Shall these also be celebrated? Or prevented?
the bird of time has but a little way
to flutter,
and the bird is on the wing
