Hello, …hello. Hello?
Oh, there you are. Been a while. What does one say after so long? I suppose we could reminisce, (or I could), but that is regressive in a way. Listening to oldies, remembering passed sentiments, finding lost feelings that were left unfinished, it’s all just an effort to avoid this moment—or finish the other moment from a safe distance. And that of course is impossible. It’s like, “You can never go home.” Except you can never go back. You can only pretend to. And that’s a photograph, not the present. Tear it up. Throw it away.
On the other hand, is there really a value to the sentiments gone-by? Do we gain a sense of realism from the moments remembered? Are sentiments the substance of time?
I think that is just the problem. Time. It is an illusion, like motion is an illusion. It’s relative to something else which may or may not also be in motion. And if you are in motion, and I am in similar motion, then relative to each other we are together, still.
There is a moment that is not passing. There is a ‘time’, if you will, which is not within time. We have a place which is not perishable—an eternity which can never be left behind. The challenge for me is to find it, amid all the empty coffee cups and unpaid bills; to tear up all the photos, to abandon sentiment-dwelling, to come back from all the reminiscences of youthful beaches and summer nights gone by, to resist the fond lament of past familiarity. My calling is to find what I am looking for where I have never looked before.
And it will be new. The place of no place, in the time of no-time, is. Simply is.