You Forgot It In People

It's an experience I must have somehow forgotten, for how can you long for a feeling without ever having experienced it?

All I want is for someone to listen to Sleater-Kinney with me. To lie on the floor, the two of us in each other's presence with the music playing between us. Each of us experiencing something new in each song; lyrics we hadn't really paid attention to or riffs we'd never taken the time to notice before.

And quite possibly, it may be dark. The lights could be dim, or extinguished entirely-- or there could be sun spilling in through the window, light overflowing frame's confine and skin illuminated in washes of subtle golden tones. Notes mixing with eddying particles of dust in the air; vibrations of some new life form felt through the intertwining of fibers and fingers in the carpet.

Complete parallel comfort in the same tiny space. Mutual appreciation for the same things; appreciation heightened by presence and coupling. A simplistic marriage of spent time.

No registration of temperature or of knots in the back. No such trivialities as seconds. The basal kind of joy we used to experience as kids-- when our imagination and its fantasies were sufficient companionship.

There is a bit of that wonder gone from this world. We miss it when we remember, and we remember all the same.

Even as I write I forget these feelings. Perhaps we lost these bits of ourselves when we began putting them to paper-- and now, look: no longer is there any paper. Like that, we realize how our lives have slipped by. Simple things like daydreaming are forgotten; wonderment is forgotten, and yet we keep on writing.

We keep on pushing pencils. Then we graduate to pens, and change from standard print to cursive.

Next come the mechanical pencils, and we lose standard print and cursive both: opting first for a sloppy-yet-individualistic mixture of the two, and then the complete elimination of said.

Now it's keys and fonts, and none of the expressiveness of shape and movement. The letters all have their space, not one runs into the other.

And we've lost track of ourselves; we've begun to lose track of our lives. On occasion--whether it be by accident or by some small will of our former selves-- we look back, telling ourselves it's to gauge just how far we've come, but all the while knowing deep-down that we miss something.

Before too long, we've forgotten what we miss. We miss what we've forgotten.

And every day with the forward step. Every day with the riff, the beat, the tempo: measure by measure, til the song has ended. With no appreciation for the greater entity, the selfless giving and combination of all these parts which lose their importance to something larger.

And we have to hit the back button, start the track over again, because we realize-- suddenly-- that we have no idea what just happened. In all our efforts to know by heart the lines and notes and rhythms and tempos with which we've become all too familiar, we have lost all meaning in the greater song.

And we have to hit the back button, start the track over again...
And we have to hit the back button, start the track
... ... ... ... hit the back button, start the track
(because we realize)
And we have to hit the back button, start
(... have no idea what just...)


Hit the back button: start the track
... over again.