"You Just Surprised Me"

I sit somewhere outside my head. There are moments of clarity where the mist my head is in clears, and life is pristine, and the action is clear. These interruptions offer me breath, and take it from me.

That I have missed a step, that I have taken a backseat to the whims of the world around me might be clear. But wasn’t I here. Didn’t I, in my very presence, exert force? Or did my being waste the energy given to initiative?

To know that I have been missing speaks only to the sight of a lightly worn path far off from any fellow travelers. It does not speak to my way home. And after so many years, what home is left? An album of people, once a family. A collection of places I might have visited, and moments with friends so often forgotten.

And yet, there is something to be said about the comfort of loss through forgetting; something about the wanting to hold onto a memory. “Where am I?” I am here. This is a place I want to remember. This is a time I want to recall. These are the people I want to hold on to.

There is hope in that.