How the Mind Does Wander

It is my habit to seek solace in memories. You may say that makes me extraordinarily sentimental, but I can do without you as long as I can remember you, and that makes me strong. A substitute is sometimes the only way to kick a habit.

Water is everywhere around me, and I am in love with the scent of wet concrete, the timeless sound of water rushing, and the mystery of light beams penetrating murky pools. I witness the chronic unrest of colloidal particles (fine suspended solids, less than one micron in diameter, which never settle out of a body of water) and the roiling clouds of dust specks in the beams of sunlight, and it seems that the slow hypnotic movement is an infinite cycle, circuitous, a dance shared by water and air. It is a dance of entrapment, of things inescapable. Like time, which never rests, and never stops dancing in circles.

Witnessing a long death (which is just life), my mind can’t seem to grasp the possibility of a moment when a body relaxes its hold on living. At twenty-five I still don’t comprehend the finality of death. I can’t understand why life won’t return to a body, can’t be repaired, even though the heart isn’t pumping and the brain isn’t sending staccato signals to the rest of the organs in the body. This brings to light the subject of spirituality, which to me seems then the only possible cause for death; that something in us that creates life, something separate from circulation and nerve endings and absorbent tissues, departs forever. This makes me hopeful that there is something beyond life… but it’s enough for me, someone who absolutely loves to sleep, to think that someday I’ll be so bloody tired (like Grandma is now) that infinite blackness and complete lack of consciousness will be truly appealing, if that’s all there is.

And I do get weary of memories of you.