September 24, 2012

• Dear future self

  You know how years later you have no idea what tasks you were worried about getting done on a specific day, a day that has since dissolved into an emotionless un-nostalgic solvent that you stashed away in your mind’s darked locked cabinet of old beakers and lost experiments?

  Here is what I’ve been worried about today.

  1. Folding the clothes scattered on my floor and thrown in laundry baskets.

  2. Cleaning the bathroom.

  3. Walking to the grocery store to buy something to drink. 

  4. Reworking the murder mystery so that people who weren’t there can go through it by themselves.

  5. Continuing the novel I’m reading.

  6. Writing down the things that happened last week.

  7. Looking up words from some stories I read recently.

  8. Exercising.

  9. Cleaning out my car. (A considerable task.)

  10. Getting a shift covered on Wednesday.

  11. Going home to watch football with my little brother, whom I miss a lot.

  Writing all this down makes it seem like a lot less, but add in thoughts about relationships in all the cracks, doubts about where life is going, and a twenty page hour-long wikipedia rigamarole that started with the page on what a ‘muddler’ is, and it adds up.

  But I read a story that made me feel a lot, and afterward I looked out the kitchen window at the swaying shadow of the backyard tree against the garage, and I stood in the silence of the wind shushing the world, and I thought, the things I am now seeing came from nothing, and so have I come from nothing to see them.  Then I noticed the security light was on, and I wondered how that was possible if there was no one around to activate it.  Maybe it’s the tree’s branches, I thought.

  Worryworryworry – beauty – worryworryworry.  Such are the lives we lead.  But in that moment, do you have someone to whom you bend your knee?  I wonder, is that all that separates people?

  • 4:51 pm
  • 2 Comments