A Moment if you will...

I am going to be introspective. It's been in affect for the last 24 hours, starting with my visit with the Tall Man. He seemed to handle it well, but I felt I soured my mood of the night with constantly recollecting my life. We were sharing, ideas and stories, which is very nice. Due to recent events, being introspective has taken on a much stranger meaning for me. I feel myself getting tangled up and lost in my memories.

Moments that once seemed trivial suddenly weight the balance. Then I am wondering how I wasted those moments performing that task. Or I wonder why can't that feeling I had once, and taken for granted, return? The Tall Man says I have a a good voice for storytelling and that I am teaching him a whole world he doesn't know. My ramblings of theatre, actually interest someone to the point that they asked me to continue speaking? Yet, I withdrew in my mind feeling conscious of the assault & battery with my mouth.

I come to a moment where I think: Return back to your old ways and freak out over this...this nothing? Or try a different route. I shall take a route that I normally have looked over. I shall not pity myself for making a minor mistake. I will not recede back into the shell.

I am lost in a specific memory: I am 14. I remember visiting my grandparents in Florida. A small retirement village. Stationary motor homes, decorated as if families had lived in them for generations. I never felt so safe. I think of going out on the boat. I remember discovering Starlight Express and Sunset Blvd. For the first time. I remember sitting on the deck and reading Agatha Christie, just sitting for hours and reading. Breathing, letting the non-time pass on. Laying in it. Not thinking about the future, thinking about anything. Taking for granted what it's like to not think. At that time my future didn't matter because I was assured in one thing. That I would be in it.

Destiny and life didn't matter. Once again they were written out already. I just had to go along in my ways and it would all unfold. I remember riding out on that boat, watching the sun and feeling the stillness. Sitting with my Disc man on my lap. Listening to silence. The end would come, but like my life I somehow had skipped out on it. I was going to feel like this forever.

Then I leave the memory and return to now. And I'm overcome. I partially blame it on John Steinbeck. Which may seem absurd but you try going through life changing moments and reading East of Eden. Then tell me how you handle those moments, as you watch the entire history of a family pass through pages. It happens so quickly, but naturally we accept it. We accept the briefness of it all. When the characters skip ages, we allow it because that's how life goes. One moment we're 14 and the next we're 22.

Yet, that's only been 8 years! Hardly a decade yet! Though you, you have the nerve to be introspective? You pretend to think your life means something, not even a decade in. You have no legacy yet. You don't even have real memories yet. You have breezes, you have small drifts that come and go. If you're lost now people will not remember you. They will recall, but they won't feel it. They'll say I recall. Let's face it, even the sound of the two words has a distinctive difference.

So let the time pass, let it flow. I shall wade in it. I shall lap up the time and enjoy those moments of in taking. For it happens as quickly as you inhale, then finishes before the exhale. Then when I am without it, when it's moving to fast. I cannot stop to take a drink. I will go on, knowing it'll happen again.

Now I am drinking, I am guzzling. I have tasted life tinged with something else. And it's caused my mind to shift. It's the calm that has descended from the delirium or the shock. I am the lost tragedian, I've always played the sob song. So well that I begin to feel comfortable in a skin that I shouldn't. I rebelled and not only went the way they advised not to feel, but I preceded to live in it. I am capable of moments of happiness, but I feel that I'm more susceptible of the opposite.

Yet now I have decided to live against it. I have decided to be gracious! To enjoy the life that the world has given me. Which may be moments to late. On whose authority, I ask? Society? The moment I was born society was against me, this is just another battle of a larger war.

My body, that's so used to the sad state is reminding me. That's where this introspection comes from. It's the siren calling the ship back to the island. It's just set sail ladies, let us see where it ends up? Are we agreed? For however far this ship sails, if it's journey proves to be a disaster, the song will sound sweeter when we return.