because my eyes were never big enough to see you
I dislike the term unfocused but it naturally comes to mind today. The problem is I am focused on other things, not work or chores or the myriad bullits on my daily ‘to do’ list. I am focused, instead, on trying to evoke precise faces and phrases of people I knew 10-15 years ago. It’s an exercise I enjoy on cold days and when I’m alone for long periods. Yet despite the pleasure, it is a galling pastime. Even if I could reconstruct someone down to the intangibles, so fully I can smell them again, that person no longer exists.
I don’t care who these people are on this particular day. I want them solely as they were before, and myself, too, as I was then. And somehow, during this impossible encounter, I want to be there as I am now. I want to be there with newfound crow’s feet and the telltale effects of gravity on my soft, fleshy bits, but vaporous and unfelt in the realm of ghosts, defiant of futility, trying to horde every last detail so I can finally remember exactly how it was.
I am itchy with the anxiety of haunting myself.
