Sometimes the questions are too much. The thoughts one length too consuming, one level too exhausting, one degree too debilitating. Sometimes the mind condemns the body to physical paralysis, subjects its chemistry to chaos, asphyxiates the heart into a thick and suffocated silence. From the alchemy grows a pernicious anarchy.
Sometimes it’s the slightest of things: a familiar gesture, an avocado sliced just so, a rainbow sunset painfully alike a former rainbow sky. The breath catches in your throat, ragged and shallow. A particular pair of boots. A throwaway comment from a taxi-driver, harking back to the days of yore. Your body flattened and forlorn against a rapidly spinning earth, vertigo long revoking the freedom of forward motion.
Sometimes it’s the eye falling on a date now passed; the mind casting forth kaleidoscope memories all and sundry. It’s the notion of your future renounced, your past erased, your present slain. Your happiness extinguished. The summer garden weeded before the flora has come to bloom. A diary flipped open to an unfinished entry, the pen still smarting from the warmth of its master. A canister of film perished by morning’s first light, precious moments now exposed beyond repair. A future unknown, yet a mind still wondering, regardless. But a future is a perennial unknown, a past a poisoned chalice.
