Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Without words

In another life I wouldn’t be just sitting here. Day after day, wondering where the words have gone. Like looking at photos of forgotten friends I’ll never see again. Punches of memory that leave only the slightest of bruises. I take a tentative step, but I have nowhere to go.

I used to believe that time was on my side. In the way that each new day is another chance. To find what is missing. To put right what is wrong. But time is little more than a trickster. A funhouse mirror that distorts truth into dreams. The sun may rise and set, but the day remains the same. Like running on a treadmill. A tangled knot in the thread of life. My feet may feel the pull of the distance, but my head knows I can’t go anywhere.

A beginning. A middle. And an impending end. A circle of breadcrumbs more than stale enough to follow. And here I sit. Without words.

3 comments:

  1. those were words enough... powerful as ever!

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  2. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.
    —Moby-Dick, Ch. 41

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  3. i can resonate with your longing for words and the time to work with them.... i have been similarly afflicted these past few months. these words you have just written were quite poignant and heartfelt, as usual.
    always nice to see your writing, whenever that happens.

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