After the madness of momentum comes its death. As inexplicable as its birth, in its death, it leaves in its wake a feeling and a sense of puzzlement and a weary expectation of its next visit. I have lost count and track, there is no longer the pursuit of seeing and finding patterns. The forfeiture of all yesterdays and tomorrows brings forth a beggar's poverty in accepting the present and only the present -- what is there is only now.
As the days slip by, there is order, accomplishments and the memories of milestones past, but there is also the rancour of tepidness in most things. Things work as advertised, predictable and accounted for. But it also brings with it a restlessness that refuses to die. Things go wrong, things go right, but you carry on as a certainty. If in this goodness there is no great sense of accomplishment or joy, then what is it that will bring that forth?
The pursuit of which is the hardest one to handle: avoid temporary deviations, stay the course and let imagined ghosts remain just that - imagined ghosts. Five years ago, from the other end of the spectrum, I could not bring myself to even smile, for I could not remember what that was like. The smile is no longer a problem, but belief certainly is. There is much that habit accounts for, but belief has little to do with it anymore.
As I sit and wonder about the years passing by, I see people, friends, family that I have known going in different directions and becoming different things. Through a large part of my twenties I distanced myself from all of that and having gone back and closer over the past couple of years, I still find a distance that can't be measured in words exchanged, time spent together or any other metric I could think of.
It is like a stain that refuses to go off.
Over time, I have come to understand that there is little I understand of most things. If there are limits to learning, there seems to be no limit to unlearning. Unspooled, the yarn of life is just a pile. It feels like a constant return to that pile, in a theme replicated over various acts. When there is little that anything establishes, it is only natural for the responses to also grow tepid.
