Misdirection and the Memory of Conviction.

Nothing up my sleeve, you see. Nothing in my pockets, nothing in this hand except a coin to flip. Now watch as I make it disappear.

Sometimes I feel like a cheap parlor trick. I’m incurably incorrigible, and I push against the frame of my reality until it breaks, until there’s nothing left to sweep away.

What have you had from birth? What have you never lost?

I walk through the crowds in the market, thinking, just making my way. A thousand miles is nothing to the distance between here and home. There’s no thought so strong, so alive except in memory. I remember the pain of my first kiss, the moment in which my spirit gave way and the breeze on my skin on hot summer evenings.

I remember how things were before I grew to miss my tears. I catch myself before a stream of light as the sun comes out, and I want for something. I want my sense of place back because gradually and then so very suddenly it disappeared. The going down is easy. It’s the picking yourself up that’s hard.

I’m a sailor in a different port each night. Captain of my future but not so of my past. What I wouldn’t do to be able to forget the distances I’ve traveled to get here, to let go of the eternal, perilous twilight of the soul.

I take my bearings from an unseen land full of one-eyed monsters. My compass is set by the inconstant moon, and my direction clear only when I close my eyes. It sounds like a far off whistle, a sound that breaks into my heart with laughter and washes me in sorrow.

Play me a tune I’ve not yet heard. Take my hand, if you will and soothe this day in all its melancholy glory. I’ll live to fight again if somewhere in that touch is truth – if I can learn something of passion in the very moment that something slips between us. It’s the instant just before a glass shatters at your feet. It goes on forever, a pause in the mind at the edge of all things. I wait there sometimes, full of empty promises and a sense of all I lack.

From the moment we first draw breath we are who we are. Things set in our marrow and become the course from which we draw our lifeblood and chart new ground. That breath is made of time before time makes its mark.

We cannot change the imprint of the world when it first recognises us but we can design new beginnings. If I could I would erase a little of history so that on just one day, for just one hour I could be someone other than myself. If I could know what joys, what fears, what full measure that held then perhaps I’d better be me, now.

What of self and season does not change?

Where is all that remains after we have proved traitor to our selves? If I could find that castle and kiss sleeping beauty in her dreams then maybe, just maybe my world would not seem so false-hearted. I’m content but wary. Reason escapes me, like the tide and there is little to be done. So I shrug and try to forget. I go unpardoned through my days, only looking at the horizon, only waking in my sleep.