Reviewing the past
As I awake and lie in limbo,
Not fully connected,
Reviewing the collage of my life –
The could have-beens,
Was and did;
The happenstance,
Chance and wonder,
Spread out
Like a huge quilt of parts
In colour.
All the sadness, ecstasy
And inspiration,
Flashes of understanding;
The loves, losses
And friendships,
The beauty, poetry
And argument –
Like fields seen from afar,
Isolated oasis
Of moments,
Each preserved
As a unique tableau.
As I lay back
To relive those moments –
The yearning,
The unusual,
The fondly remembered
And pathos –
Separated by deserts
Of forgotten days,
Forgotten nothing.
Yet all
Reinvented,
Rearranged
And altered to fit.
Nothing more than a false representation
Of what has been –
Only a life –
Nothing real –
A hazy, reimagined past –
As reality kicks in.
Opher 23.1.2016
Reviewing the past
There is a strange state of being that exists hovering between wakefulness and sleep in which the mind has not fully kicked in. It is a reverie. The mind hangs suspended. There is a lazy hand at the wheel. It drifts back and forth. Your life, thoughts, memories and dreams are intermingled.
It is a very pleasant state and one that I regularly enjoy.
Sometimes it appears to me that my life is nothing more than a series of anecdotes held together by some overriding phenomenon that is me. Memories are like the beads on a string. Moments and scenes played out in vivid colour. Around them everything else recedes into an impenetrable fog. The scenes are performed repeatedly and the intervening days, weeks, months and years have been blotted out. They are gone.
Yet even the memories are really vague snatches of what has been. They are not real. They have been redrafted, rearranged, embellished and augmented. Only a hint of the feelings and emotions remain as fleeting, tantalising glimpses.
How I would like to re-inhabit the various people I used to be; to revisit a handful of the forgotten days and become reacquainted with my former selves; to taste that idealism and certainty again.
Perhaps one day soon they will invent a drug that will enable you to do just that; to resurrect the entire experience of a day from the past. I know if that ever happened that I would be first in line. I also know that any drug like that would be instantly banned.
Until then I am quite happy to lie back and reacquaint myself with the scenes from my life, spread out before me like fields seen from a mountain top.
That will have to do.