snap

It's something like inhaling a little bit of glass along with cold air that's scooped up from the top of the waves, with the water as it is this time of year, so refreshing this time of year, so cold that it almost snaps you in half this time of the year.  This might not be the story that goes anywhere near a platform on the edges of the sea, where young lovers wonder if they might not be so young after all.  Let's say they are, or were, young, last year, already a year before last year, last year by now is something else altogether.  And last year doesn't quote the shadow dances of two young lovers by the edges of the sea, and this year might be willing to not do the same, and all of it is a little like inhaling a little bit of glass. 

With a little age, a cigar blooms, and it looks like mold to anyone who hasn't lived through it long enough to smoke their way through these things to know things that only the wise ones know.  With a little age, these hands are covered with a little bit of bloom, maybe not so tired, maybe not so withered, but showing signs that those kinds of gravity might show in another decade or so.  With a little age comes the knowledge that there are some people you meet again and again, and there are some people you only know for a little while.  Some of us, with a little experience, but no age really necessary, know that it's not up to decide who gets to be in which category, but we have our ideas, and we have our hopes about who gets to stay, and who has to go. 

With a little age, one might begin to learn that the worst thing in the world to say to anyone you want to cast in the role of someone who stays is that we might be running out of time.  No one likes to be rushed.  No one likes to think this might be urgent.  No one likes to be watched that closely, because everyone who walks on wires in front of thousands of people eventually falls in front of thousands of people.  And when we fall, we break like glass, and the ground swallows us like we were shards of  broken glass. 

With a little age, one might decide to write the most emo thing ever written, and decide halfway through to completely fail, in front of at least 8 people a day.  But this year, this might be the last year, and maybe, just maybe, if we pretend that the calendar ends, then we might decide that we should bring only those who are the most important, to bring them closer, and let them know that to lose them might feel very much like December in the last year of the world, and it might be more interesting to split and break into a thousand shards and fly apart in every conceivable direction, and to let the pieces scatter, so that anyone anywhere anytime for any reason might find one of the pieces and ask for a reflection of the world, what does the world look like, what does it look like in this reflection, and anyone anywhere anytime for any reason might see the same thing at the same time, so they might know, this was important, this is what was marked, this is what mattered here, and this is what mattered when it shattered on the edges of a platform by the sea, and this is what matters when it shatters on a porch in a backyard where hearts are unburied, and this is what matters when it shatters on a morning when it only seems like the dogs of the desert are watching and caring, and the rest of the world is still so very asleep, or exhausted already for having been awake to long, the dog snaps at the hand, the neck snaps at the cold too unbraced for this kind of morning, and an eye snaps open and shatters in a thousand directions, making urgent sounds on the sidewalks of the world, even though it won't do anyone any good to know that time is getting to be as shallow as a breath or a wave and as cold as it has to be for this time of the year.