Things Alive Only in Whispered Words.

All day the sky has been grey and dull, a damp blanket coating the sky, covering the sun. I spent the day in awkward transition, dreading the coming cold and the trees- empty of their leaves. I think about these last few years and wonder where they've gone. They live for me inside of letters, words piled a top one another and sent forth through the vast network of space to the minds and eyes of others. I hear the words I've read echoed in my head and I wonder how long they'll live there, waiting for me to make use of them.

Today, the sky cracked it's poems in naked thunder. I stood at the window at work looking out into the glossy parking lot, at the grimy puddles, thinking of all the things I've left unthought and unwritten, unrealized, for so long now. I am bobbing around a sea of confusion, in a raft which is too small for me and blistering beneath the burning sun. I am afloat, riding the light waves which weave me across the sea, waiting for the inevitable storm which I see so far out in the distance. I can feel the weight of all things I do not know as it pulls down on me; I can imagine all the possibilities but I cannot reach them.

There is something new. Some small light shining where it wasn't shining before. And all at once, I feel like I am losing something. The ground beneath my feet, perhaps. I am wrapped up in a world of unsaid things and slowly they are leaking out, finding the way to their rightful places. And all at once, I am keeping things in- hiding them in dark corners where they live only in whispered words.

The ground outside is still damp and obsidian, the black street iridescent and opaque. I look to it as into a crystal ball and I see myself reflected, my eyes wide with wonder. I wish I was staring out into the bright, blue pacific- my feet digging in the whiteish sand, someone beside me pressing his mouth against my neck, tasting my shoulders.

Why must we only have one life?