The Window

 

One need not live without care, to live carefree.

 

I wake to the glare of sunshine, and wish it were I out there, among Nature. Each morning, I stare through that window and pray a bird to pass. My longing consumes me. Like so many things that ache, it comes from dining upon memory. How spare is that meal! How mad, our return! In time, our hopefulness is our starvation.

 

All the years long, we fill our heads like precious boxes. We tax our moments, and squeeze them until a single, sweet drop rolls upon our palms. Then greedily, we stash it away. When life darkens, we return with keys to unlock our stores. The lid pops aloft from the fullness of that cache, and for a moment, we laugh joyously. All the best that was, lies now before us. We reach in, and take into our hands, once again, the moment of our lives. It is much smaller than we remember it, much briefer. There is little upon which to feast. In awe and in terror, we gaze. That tiniest of morsels trembles at the edge of our forks. We dare not to move in a muscle for fear we should tumble it. But stillness will not keep. It slips through, like a petal through the walls of a canyon.     

 

We see then, that Memory is the stalest crust. Even as the box overflows, we are poor. Collecting our keep, one drop at a time, finally, we despair to find the amount no more than a handful. Our stomachs ache, and we grow faint with the sadness of life. Have we no more to show than this? Have we lived at all?

 

I recall my longing: the bird that flies faster than its past. Its head does not brim with what was, but with the exhilaration of its present. I yearn to look up from my book just the moment before it flaps its wings; to see, then, tyrannical Memory reaching behind it like a shadowy claw, only to grasp upon nothingness, for the bird has flown.

 

I wish that victory for myself.