I spin these things like silver between my fingers. Pearly blue remembrance, sticky with past tribulations left uncovered. I want to stay here, with my feet placed firmly into the white earth but my mind desires distortion. Back I fall, into the silver web of pearls. My body left behind and my mind yearning for the time before. I have always been able to do it: glide past these boundaries built by my body, and I return to a time that once was. Time works in circles, it never begins, never ends. Time makes its course and falls back to my feet, a vicious cycle.
I remember, but the remembering is so real, it begins to bleed. I fall back till my mind becomes whole. I am there in the hallway, in front of the English class. I can smell the fibers of the world, spun from sentiments. I feel the clothing on my skin, the paint on the door, the thrumming lights above, yellowing my hands. I remember it, but the memory isn’t a memory anymore, I can touch it. I fall back again, into the web, coiling myself in another actuality. The old balcony at the house on Cliff Road, picking green berries from a tree. The bleeding wood beneath my feet, the berries topping like little empires down, down into my container. I breathe, I smile, I laugh. The wood prickles my skin, it was yesterday. 12 years ago, but yesterday.
Again, the world melts into what it was to me, then, on the balcony with my green berries. Whispering wind, pulling itself through the cracks of my body, feeling something, I hadn’t felt in forever. Little fingers, dripping grotesque green juice, laughing at the world made perfectly for the present, but not for the future. Never for the future. The whispers of wind fold me into another place, another race of time.
I rise from whatever this place is. Never forgotten, just creased into another corner of the drawer, sealed. The garden behind the apartments down from the park built into a triangle, where the cats crept like little nightmares in the dark. The plastic blender, bought from Tuesday Morning, broken. Making milkshakes for the members of my mini-revolution, the stuffed animals that had aided me through everything. Singing rumors, on the bleeding deck, on the table with an old blanket as a tablecloth. Shoving away everything I wanted to forget into a small space behind my ears. The September afternoon, settling into my silhouette. I loved it here, in this moment. The smell, the sound, Rhiannon. It pulls me back, dragging me through the sticky pearls to the white earth, to the white world around me.
Memories pull like thread. The web, spun by my own benevolent fingers, lingers on the loom behind my eyes. The past waits among the present, passed by every eye. It lures us in with the sparkle of life that we lived before, but the circle spins, again and again. White earth, silver thread. Needles weaving between two worlds. Am I here or in another existence?
What is the difference?
