These Glimpses I Carry

The inner workings of memory. Pull me close and hold me down. Lost my face in a song, a remembering song, a fighting gloves song. Remember I'm not to let anxiety get the upper hand, and then, a fat, black pound to knock my shins out of this ice-cold river, a snippet. A glance, and not just. Walking Dublin, side street by the Post. Ye old rebel's place. The hum of wind brushing the hair from my face, the feeling of wonder, that tremendous bit of fucking luck.

All things I remember. The sheer miracle of existing on a planet that allows me to experience such random, beautiful things, and doesn't ask me for a kidney or a pound of flesh. Or at least, not yet.

I'm fascinated by the way my memory works, and I wonder if yours does, also? Or perhaps we're more heartbreakingly different than I could ever imagine. Maybe it's true that I'm all alone here.

One of my favorite things about traveling through life is I carry in me echoes of places I've been. Like this random street in Dublin. And that, for a second, just reading a Dublin book with no particular merit, no roll-call of all my favorite places there, only just being, how that is enough (and plenty) to rocket me back. So that for a few moments, the air around me swells with the smell of Dublin, the possibility, the sense of wonder and history, the thrumming of being far from home, an openness to beauty.

That is enough.

Sometimes, I'll get the feeling so intensely that it toes the border between dream and waking, the feeling of sitting in Trafalgar, or walking like a secret stowaway mouse along the Seine. And it's nothing short of a miracle to me, the possibility of such things.

Times, I'll get a feeling of presence, a longing so great for somebody in my past, I have to sit aside from my life for several seconds afterward. It's not that I'm actively missing the person, but that from time to time, I'll receive such an intense flash of their presence and what their clothes smelled like, and what I felt inside the most private corners of my being, when encountering them and being with them, that time no longer makes sense to me.

'Cause how can I be standing here with you now, yet be transported back to my self from years before, all my present feelings ripped from me and replaced with something from before?

Are my present feelings real at all? And what is real, and how do I prove this?

It's the same with places.

An intense longing to walk into a particular bookstore in a far away place. Why? How does my mind add up experiences to come out with what it has, and do I stand any chance at all of even mastering it?

I get flashes of being alive someplace else, in a separate time, and get them so vividly that for minutes, I have a hard time being here.
I do this with writing often. Have a hard time stepping back on the present plane, and meet people's gaze with a bizarre sort of not here look. Harrangued like an alien visiting for the first time.

But it happens also sometimes with memories. Just now, reading on my balcony, a breeze so strong it blew me down. It's the impression I'm in Dublin, but also of being two years into my past. Like I've time-traveled inside my mind.

Except I'm not sure how to master it, which leaves me vulnerable. I'm here,but also, always, live with the possibility of being elsewhere. Of being gone entirely.

(Could I not?)

If I took the time to replace
What my mind erased
I still feel as if I'm here but I'm gone
How did I get so far gone?
Where do I belong?

Does this happen to you? Not pure remembering, but being transported. To a person, to a place, to a sensation. It's often the most unassuming things, certainly not the highlights, yet somehow, it's always these things that remain salient, where the "big 'uns" are long gone.