Animal

I see myself in people so they see themselves in me. I get swept up. I am taken by their brooms, lost in their dust and pushed into their corners.

"Take me and push me around. It's okay. I want to. I like the floor."

Before, I never trusted happiness. I was always convinced it would go away, that I couldn't get too comfortable, that it wouldn't be there for me when I needed it. I never lay in what I loved because I wanted it too much. I didn't know that it wanted me, too.

“It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time”

In the darkness, there are pangs of nostalgia for things I thought I had. Once, it mattered, it happened, with great force. Now, it's gone. I can't remember any of it. I don't know where it went. Stuck in a vacuum of what I thought I knew once. Hidden is some place, worn like glasses, vision shifting.

"Dad, do you think the world is better now than before?"

He looked away.

"I think it's coalesced. There's more good and more bad. What's peculiar is that you can't separate the two. It's a gel."

I am surprised not that things changed, but that things became so different and so quickly. I look back at the girl I used to be and I don't know her. My friend Sarah is beautiful, especially lit by candlelight.

"Do you feel like it doesn't matter?" I asked her. "Things are so important in the present, the moment starts disappearing as soon as it ends. You remember less and less, and eventually you're left with nothing. So, nothing really matters, not so much. There's something beautiful and freeing in that."

Memory is deceptive because it's coloured by today's events, Einstein said that.

I guess we all have our time machines. Mine's defective. I can't travel backwards with any confidence. What I remember jumps in front of me, like a child crossing the street too quick, like a sword cutting air, like scissors through hair. It hurts and I don't know why because I don't want to go back.

"For time is the longest distance between two places."