It was April. April at the end coming to a close. The old neighborhood on this once familiar road no longer taken, having come to a close. Revisited once again, one more time. How many years betwixt still unresolved, caught in the mind between? Showing too much had been by now shuttered, passing unnoticed to his long absented eye. Whole generations having co-opted it and made it there own. And then, just as unceremoniously as he, had left it never to be seen ever again. So odd that he still experienced the same old places so freshly within his mind? So many locations, those same old places, lodged in his mind like old pensioners ever-restless and undisturbed from their sleep in the past. The notion of time in his head standing dormant and unmoving from where he had left various episodes off in the moment. Posting a note pledging to return to the very next moment his attention turned back decades too late. His own time come and gone in a instant trivial and forgotten like a scrap of paper flying past driven by a gust of wind.
Incredible to him how this world now presently in existence had no evidence of him and all that he persisted in knowing? And overlooked him as an empty fixture faded handed over to the nonexistence of the aged. Not knowing, like he did precisely, what was real and what was mere conjecture by wizened infant experts. Perhaps to them all a faulty tale of increasingly faulty recollection? All old stories of little consequence to their current perpetually ‘on the go‘ era. His father’s world told to him still in evidence in alleys and angles unsung. Tidbits in single sentences that he found no fit audience with which to repeat them to.
She lived in the house that Deco built. Terracotta, enameled brick Babylonian frieze’d. Long and lithe of limb in the manner of a feline. This strange creature displaced from a time unidentifiable to any mortal. Timeless, endless and incredibly fascinating. So much so to the point of self-immolation. All that knew her not long after their infatuation simply disappearing from public view. Sequestered from then on, or simply no longer there. Quite appropriately no one he knew of could recall her family or quite exactly where she had come from? Mystery in all things beyond the occasional fact of her appearance prevailed.
He had spied her in the most indefinite of places. Dark corners full of whimsy in this otherwise familiar universe that came in and out of focus like disparate segments of a dream. One episode in particular, when not sure if he was deep in sleep or awake, he was immediately confronted with the silhouette of an attacker that quickly overpowered him with ease. He felt himself overwhelmed and to his surprised returned unscathed back within the same bedroom several feet from the hallway where the incident had transpired. His heart beating furiously at a breakaway pace. Some laughter to himself. It all begins from here! Some unknown anonymous hitman from past esoteric parts wholly unknown.
The distance to retrieve something perceived as forgotten . This search for someone unnamed and long lost. Ulysses and Penelope? Maybe persons less notable. Let downs, disappointments, maybe nothing in this existence stands still. Attributions paid the waiting cliches. Involvement, and lack of same, with the latest heartstrings of the lives of others. Looking out the window as the scenery passes. Scanning structures once again for what was not changed since a last visitation with unnamed parties now long deceased. Notes and letters when such things were evident. Childlike scrawls that might as well be scratched in Arabic as anything plainly decipherable. “You were a beautiful baby in the hospital . . . “, that echoes through an adjoining baby’s snores via his dead mother’s lips.
Time and space incompetent in changing memory. Animal senses more concerned with securing place. That part of life slipping away suddenly recovered in the immediacy of the instant of the latest moment’s decay. Somehow to be resurrected perilously brief. The moment of parting prolonged. Celebrate the artificial by celebrating the post-modern! Absurdity the child just beside one compulsively scribbling notes on tiny scraps of paper. Post adolescent awkward ingenue Lolita just across the way reading Nabokov scrunched up next to an old man. All manner of mountebanks. Each with their own particular tic flexing it in the fiction of privacy in public. Anyone can irritate anyone by circumstance alone. Deco buildings going wholly unnoticed.