“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths.”

Virginia Woolf, Sketch of the Past

I do not feel that I have a singular moment to breathe. Even in the lulls where I am able to sit and muse, there is forever a stale thought lingering in the background of my memory; its acidity invades my tongue and rips me from my peace, forcing me into action. Some thing, permanently shrouded, floats around the rim of my sight, just out of reach, taunting me with its blurred outline and begging me to chase it. I wish these thoughts would retract, allow me sleep, yet they pervade my mind with insistence. How can I be expected to look behind me, understand the weight of my actions, and continue on wiser if there is a wall indefinitely placed, as an act of God, on my backward path?

I feel most days that I am not cut out for romance. The weight of it too heavy, too unlike the ecstasy of imagination, for me to fathom. If I should hold her, the love I could manifest, she would be opaque, blackened with soot, and heavier than something I ever might have grabbed off of the floor or some shelf; it was merely placed into my hands, prophesied to sink with some otherworldly urgency. In childhood, she was cloudy, milky white, as the froth accumulating on the world built between the wave and the land, and I could toss her ballooned figure up with giddy, naïve joyfulness. She was nothing more than the car ride after coming home from school, and a grandmother cooing with a syrupy sweetness at your shining golden hair. Not a complication, or a restriction, or some hidden code for you to decipher. Simply a softness in a wicker basket.

For now,

G.D.