If time flies, but there’s no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound?

I think it does, but it’s more like an echo. Perhaps you’ll notice a slight whistling in your ears, like the sigh of air escaping from your life. It’s a somber, melancholy sound, and it makes you stop and think. “What was that?” you may ask yourself. Or, “Is there something I’ve forgotten?” Well, yes. You’ve forgotten many things. And, sadly, you’ll never know because…you’ve forgotten them.

We sat in a dusky bar, my dear friend James and I, bemusedly conversing while sipping gin and tonics. Moments before, we’d walked the High Line above Manhattan’s enlivened West Side streets, gazing through apartment windows, inventing stories about who may live there and what we’d be like if we did. The sun slipped past and downward, following a familiar course while we ventured along this new one. Pausing to sit and watch a projector display on a blank wall, full of colors and music and light, we saw a black balloon drift by above our heads and turned to look at one another, mouths agape, eyes brightened by a touch of magic. It was the most inside of inside jokes; a little game we played from across the seas – James from his flat in London, me from wherever I was residing at the time, be it St. Augustine or Miami –  a ceremony of sorts related to our shared passion for the written word combined with music. And here it was: a section of our separate worlds entwined and brought to life. What were the chances? How could this be? Why ever now, at this time and place?

And now, having traversed the boardwalk, allowed the wood to slip unhindered beneath our soles, we lingered at the small and hazy room hidden within a restaurant we assumed to be a front for something else (or at least in our most wild imaginations), for why else would they hasten us into the bar, uprooted and dislodged from our comfortable al fresco table? We had laughed then and gone along for the ride.

“At least this will make the night more memorable,” one of us most likely quipped. Which, in turn, would have led to the conversation which I now recall. Such a slender thread of consciousness, such a delicate display; yet somehow feral in its need to be fulfilled. The transcendence, the translucency, of memory was the chosen topic, or perhaps the one which had chosen us. James related how he’d always thought of memory as being a series of blurred images, like a group of photos taken, one after the other, while the subject keeps moving forward. Motion blur, I think they call it. And isn’t that what life is all about? The always moving forward, not able to go back, while everything blurs around you, and into you, and you into it. Into everything.

When I look back on that night, I wonder if James remembers the same things that I do, if our memories are interchangeable, if they shift or overlap. I’m certain that they do, and will continue to do so, at least at certain moments. We share these themes, my British friend and I; fascinated by our minds’ ability to recall the smallest details, yet forget the bigger picture. And how, sometimes, it all can seem so real again; so vivid and alive. In just a memory.

Time has passed, of course. It’s been nearly a year since that night in Manhattan; our few days in New York. I find myself remembering so clearly what we said and what we did, how the light reflected on the windows and the streets and the lake in Central Park, the skylines, the fire escape, taking photos from the Brooklyn Bridge, the subway and the adventure of it all. Meanwhile, time moved by unmentioned (as something one would choose to look away from – avert your gaze and maybe it won’t sting). Another year to tuck beneath our belts. New friendships forged and others broken; old ties that had weathered with the years, unnoticed, untended, and eventually worn through.

 And so I’ve taken to this blog again, another thing that slipped and fell upon the wayside. I’ve been writing, I’ve been living – still existing, but so fettered by my thoughts of what I should and shouldn’t do. And why I should or shouldn’t do. I’ve missed this, the flow of writing something that isn’t a poem, not a book; no characters to follow but myself. Just me and my own thoughts. I’ve come to accept, as I think I needed to, that this is more a diary than I had allowed myself to believe. Others will read it...or they won’t. But in the end, that doesn’t matter. This is for me, so here I am again.

Listening…