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It starts with silence. It always seems to... I find myself surrounded by silence, stillness, often secluded. Always wandering, one day ends and another begins. I talk to people and I drift for hours and hours. And the day always ends... and another will begin.
It starts to feel like life is just several broken-up segments that have nothing to do with each other. You wander, and you never look back. You get lost in the things you do. Time flows, quietly. Time is silent, walking behind you without a word or a sound. You always focus on what's in front of you...
It might happen when I hear nostalgic music. It might happen when I look up at an expansive horizon of sky and clouds, and feel tiny... I stop, and I begin to feel it. Time. I remember that all of these broken segments are my everything. Walking through all of these broken segments... was me. I remember those places. I see those memories in a view from a set of eyes I know belonged to me. But sometimes it's hard to believe I was actually there. Was that actually me?
It was. I am sure of it. I'm sure, as my breath is taken away. It was me... all of it. This is my life. I see the faces and remember the words of people that appeared somewhere in the flow of that time, and disappeared just the same. They drifted into the flow of my life, and then they drifted back out, into the vast, endless expanse... somewhere out there. Not here... almost certainly never again.
Some leave impressions that remain longer than others. Some leave impressions that will never fade. Some impressions fade, and are lost forever... into the nothing, as if they never existed to begin with. Those people who left those impressions that will never fade... are they still there? Look around.
Most of them aren't, when I look around. For most of them, all that remained was an impression... a mark. They were here. But that's all there is, a mark. I ponder it, in the silence. It exists... but they no longer seem to.
On the edge of a bluff, with a view of a horizon that seemed to reach out into infinity... the low, soft, yet shimmering resplendence of the sunset bled out onto the flowing water of the ocean below, which licked at the base of the bluff. Around me, the trees swayed slowly... the sound of the breeze almost didn't seem to be a sound at all, but instead, blended into the silence without breaking it. This is the image that was reflected in my eyes, as I slowly began to realize, once again... everything that has happened up to this moment... it's all linked. This is my life.
Looking back at the expanse of my life, I see so much of what I feel now, dominating my memories. Silence... solitude. Many times, pain and loneliness went hand in hand with that silence and solitude. Sometimes, there was pain so deep, so real, that it felt like my end had come to meet me already. That I'd be swallowed by blackness, eaten by destructive cancer until there was nothing. Sometimes, when I remembered before, I wondered if there would ever be anything but pain. I thought it was all ending... I thought I was on the cusp of slipping away forever. Sometimes I thought it should come already, and I'd turn back to my silent, motionless past, and take one last look before disappearing forever.
Through so many of the segments of life, that seem to be broken up and separate, I had done what so, so very many others do. Some, their entire lives, until the moment that they disappear into the stillness, and the silence... I stumbled around in fog, never sure, but trying to just believe. Faithful, chasing away thoughts of tomorrow. Inert, disregarding the reasons to move, fearing the opportunities to act. Never looking at myself, but turning away and covering my eyes at the sight of my reflection, my everything.
I can't remember when, exactly, I stopped stumbling around in the fog. So many others try to stumble out of the fog. It can't be done... instead, if you to stop, and you ponder your lack of sight, and if you look down at your own two hands, and you look at your own reflection with unblinking eyes, you may look up again, at your surroundings, and be able to see more than the colorless gray of impenetrable fog. You may start to see the dull shapes of things in the distance... and you might follow them until you stop and look around again, seeing that there is no longer any fog. You can see it... a beacon. It may be close, and it may just be a soft flickering glow in the distance. But you will never again be unsure of the direction in which you walk... instead, you may finally focus on nothing else but the distance between you and your destination.