Thursday, August 07, 2008

Yesterday, sore and cranky from a trip to the dentist, I stopped to buy some flowers--it's very Mary Tyler Moore around here sometimes. The flowers I picked up were a bright purple sometimes flecked with white, and when I brought them home and put them in water the water turned purple. So I guess that their color isn't particularly natural.

I'm not sure what my alt text would say if you hovered over me these days. I'm feeling a little lost, lately. Maybe right now I just don't have any.

A few days ago I left my apartment just before the gloaming, when there was still some sunlight filtering down through the trees. I locked my front door and turned around to find a disembodied face floating just between two trees, a male face with a prominent nose. My heart thudded to a stop and I froze, which feels like a logical reaction when a ghost face is staring at you in the daylight. I waited to see what would happen, and when nothing did I walked cautiously forward, slowly, not making any sudden moves. Not wanting to disturb the face.
Once the angle changed, I realized that the face was a spider web, the nose the spider. Somehow, that wasn't as comforting as it maybe should have been.

But then this morning the automatic doors at work started closing before I was through them, so perhaps it's me that's actually a ghost.

I am very very busy most of my days in part because the fact of all of this time ahead of me feels much too heavy to carry if I actually stop to think about it. All of those years broken down into hours and minutes and seconds full of nothing but time--I think I'd need more than just two hands to carry it all if I stopped moving long enough for it to catch up. I think this is also why I think about outer space so often: because in the face of the infinite room in the universe, all the time left in the rest of my life feels slightly more manageable.

No comments: