wrinkle in time

if this could be a series of images it would be this: the scent of orange blossoms. a wet japanese maple leaf falling to the ground, burned out windows, light filtering through the carbon charred glass, the faint (possibly imagined) sound of a few crazed birds in the fog.

 what is it to live with someone? how can they not recede into: meals, comfort, warm bed, white noise.

 a split second of your scent comes suddenly. running numbly, it hits me, impossibly sweet, impossible that it is just the air that smells like this, and not a person. a thing. you. this is what a scent should be; all around you, all of a sudden, like being engulfed in a burst of color, and then just as quickly, gone. this smell has a clear and simple meaning to me : you are here. now. and everything that was and will be has already happened and will again. and it is true. and i am grateful.

 a huge, wet, pile of leaves falls onto the sidewalk at my feet, first a few inches from my nose, then a few inches from my feet. it is as if i have, by running this block rather than another, isolated a tiny moment in time that would have otherwise been given to the birds or the wide open world, but instead, was shared with me. time slows down even more as the snow falls, and there is not one instant in which, in its descent, it is not beautiful.

i know, as i pass this house, from the roses that were left on the doorstep, the candles burning and pictures left, that the people who lived in this house died in the fire. now there are windowless vans of men pulling up to work on it, shattering the early morning silence, and every day as i pass it, i make eye contact with and nod my head to them. as I run past, i look inside the windows, somehow still mostly in tact. the light filtering through them is so strange. green moss trails along the outside of the windows, black carbon marks in the shapes of flames trace the inside. there is something oceanic about the light. it should be sad, or spooky, but instead i can only see the uniqueness of this light, the strange beauty of it all.
and suddenly my ears are filled with screaming of the birds, cackling at the top of their lungs, all at once. my senses feel completely taken up and i think that this experience is incomplete with only my shadow at my side.