Moments...
You are something that breathes
Honey touches the tongue, activates a cell, and sends a signal. All in one-tenth of a second. In one hundred milliseconds. A hundred camera flashes. A hundred flaps of a fly's wings. Receptors bind to the memory of a substance that's already slipping away. Absence follows infiltration. Nothing stable stays that way for long. There will be other tastes, other sensations, but none exactly the same as this one, not again.
Between the experience and the recognition, the remembering lasts longer than the event.
"People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves" Blake Crouch says. We lose a job. We lose friends. A loved one dies. A marriage ends. Something perfect turns out not to be. Something meant to stand forever, crumbles apart and falls. Everything that flickers eventually fades. Every expression of fixity yields to alteration and sway.
What is there to grasp? To what can we cling? When the only thing to grip is the emptiness, the vacuity? We hold on to the absence, the missing-ness, the unavailability. We keep a vigil for what what has passed, for what we can't repeal. For all the things we've lost. All the steps we can't retrace.
Between what is woven and what is thrown away. The warp and the woof. The constriction of entwining textures. The over/under patterns of tension and entropy. "[T]he past hangs upon [us] as a burden", John Dewey says. It threads it's way through. In determined designs of knots and braids, pulled taut and held in place, "it invades the present with a sense of regret, of opportunities not used, and of consequences we wish undone." An oppression put upon us, one we put upon ourselves.
It's hard to let it go. It's difficult to care. To move beyond the loss. To expose your heart to danger, to the inevitability of it breaking. The knowledge that it will be broken again. It's safer to back yourself into a corner, to brick yourself in. To strand yourself into a memory, a tapestry. A testament to the way things were, to what was, to what's missing. A still life in memoriam. A mausoleum. A sepulchre.
Between desire and retreat, between the terror and the taste, what is there to grasp? To what can we cling? Perhaps nothing other than this moment, the fact that it passes, that sometimes it's sweet, that you are something that breathes.