light the corners of my mind

life is not made up of discrete, snapshot-flat occurrences. life is a series of interrelated, complex experiences that combine concrete events with how you feel about those events to create memories. but once they're formed, memories don't just sit there waiting to be remembered, they morph and drift. high school graduation is simultaneously yesterday and years ago. all the games of pente you played in junior high are melded into one. that one night in college when you wandered for hours under snow-orange skies overshadows months and months of other nights.

did you ever think about something so much - remember it so purposefully - that you reach that point where you don't think about it at all anymore? it becomes a piece of you, a reality absorbed into your very essence. it is The Way Things Are. you so deeply ingest it, so completely process it, so absolutely accept it that you don't even notice it while you are moving around your day, don't even see it is there and with a trick of the mind, the ultimate irony -- you hold onto it so tightly that you squeeze it right out of your grasp. you remember it so well that you forget it altogether until you walk right into it and break your toe against the solid granite truth of it and you're reminded again that things will never be the same again.

like, maybe this weekend you'll see if speedy wants to hit the trails for a snowy run and then you walk right into the fact that speedy lives 800 miles away now. ouch! or, you'll go out to the old homeplace and see if you can find that electric football game and you smack into the granite of not knowing who lives there now. ouch! or, you're reading your emails and one's really funny and you know who would laugh at it and you're fixing to send it to her when you crash into remembering they don't get emails in heaven, or, you know, where ever she is hanging out these days. ouch.

ouch.

so maybe you broke the toe of your soul or maybe you just bruised it or maybe it's not even bruised but merely scraped. whatever. it's gonna hurt for a few minutes or a few days but it's eventually gonna quit hurting again, just like it has quit before, and you'll be skipping around soon enough, oblivious, well on your way to running into one of those walls. again.