One day, maybe yesterday, I was driving through sun flooded streets on my way home from work, when I realized that I left something back at the office. Yet, it made no sense to turn around. There was no chance I would find what I missed. I knew it would be gone before I even came close.
I don’t know when it happened, and I don’t quite understand how this is even possible, but these days I am never completely at one place. I am present, but I am not. Part of me is always somewhere else.
My thoughts have taken on a life of their own. Like a parent of an adolescent boy who only scarcely shows up to grab food, I have become a mere spectator of my own mind. Even now while I am writing this, am I thinking of rainclouds, pizza, and a white parrot. I am thinking about how great it would be to sleep right now and if it is weird to lie down in a public place. But my hands are typing.
Are these even my thoughts?
A white parrot?
Why do I feel so tired? Everything was fine ten minutes ago. And now I am struggling so hard to keep it together.
“Catch us if you can” they seem to mock me while I am trying to get a grip on my thoughts.
Writing this was not planned. I was working on an important document when I noticed how I was going to get left behind. Images of sunflowers, rugged country roads, fir trees and garden gnomes rush into my head like water down a spout. With them, all willpower is flushed away.
Images of spiderwebbed chairs, an old tape recorder, a brown suitcase, and that neon-green frisbee pop up. Then so sudden that it almost makes me gasp, I am hit with this familiar dusty-attic smell.
Now, I have lost, there is no return.
Grass to my hips, red rubber boots, that small creek behind the house, the burn of stinging nettles on my skin and the smell of sunshine on wet grass engulf me like a blanket.
If not in 30 years, see you tomorrow!