Isn’t it strange how many days go by? How many things happen, whether or not we think that they matter, and then how soon they are completely over, untouchable because the window of ‘present’ has passed by them? How soon they are simply a journal entry, not alive anymore – just a memory. Something that happened once but has gone and can only ghost through printed lettering put together to describe it or hover in the deepest recesses of a brain. Still there, stored and filed, but in a wilderness that cannot be ventured into. A place things can only venture out from unexpectedly but cannot be retrieved because they are far, far in the distance.

Maybe somewhere I have a reflection image of that hospital room, and the man who sat in a chair waiting for his somebeody to come back out to him. Maybe I have the taste of the July 24th dinner I ate when I was three, maybe I have the sound of the way Shannon’s dog barked from behind our fence. I had pet the fur of a cat, I pushed through playground gravel looking for a lost birthstone, I put my nose in the carpet to catalogue a different smell, I picked a scab off of somewhere my skin had been cut. Blood rushed to my head through these same veins I have now and pounded against my temples when I hung up-side-down, I stepped on a rainpuddled sidewalk in a single space at a particular moment, I tasted my own blood when I hadn’t before known the rusty metal-salt of it, I heard my name come from someone’s tongue. For eighteen years, eight months, two weeks, eleven days and 42 minutes with one, two, three more seconds I have been breathing from outside of my mother’s body and taking more, more, more into the wilderness of my conscious at each flare of ‘present’.

Then I can't help but look at someone elses skull. Something I cannot penetrate and will never look through. But they have seen and touched and felt and remembered years worth of the present, and it is all there – somewhere – in their head but it seems so small for so many years, too small.

That’s why it is so fascinating to talk with people, to watch them as a memory emerges from their mouth. Do you know the sound of someone’s footsteps? Recognize the feel of their hands, though blindfolded? Have you copied some of their described memories, painted with your own fill-in-the-blank colors, and re-stored them in the fortress of your own brain?

I am caught up in the things that will be 'forgotten' so easily and fast; minutia - the sting of bleach in my lungs this morning, the hair color of the woman I walked past a few hours ago, the shape of a single dying tulip that I noticed for a slice of a second. It will fade away soon, maybe even tonight. I have already forgotten half of the things I touched, saw, felt with my hands from the moment I woke up. So I wonder about it all.