A whorled story

 

***
Don’t know how long it’s been,
six months, maybe a year?
I was fine, mostly, really.
Mh? Yeah, mostly.

***
I know it’s been a year.
I’ve been doing ok.
ups and downs,
you know how it is,
maybe.

***
It felt longer at times
– longer than a year, I mean –
long days were bad days,
short days were good days,
as simple as that, really.
– so long in fact that time
felt like a volume, comprising
all axes, terms, signs, results.

***
This year has felt like a decade.
Some hours stirred tumult and tears,
and terrible truths, sometimes smaller
than a grain of sand, sometimes
larger than the Laniakea.
Other days brought silences and smiles,
great quietude filling the mind
– a Boötes of the soul, unperturbed –
the lucidity actual, irrefragable –
the mind palace like an anechoic chamber
memories seen for what they are:
starkly untinged, and evident.

***
Three hundred and thirty-eight days
sixteen hours and twelve minutes.
Every single one of those seconds
as long as a mercurial day.
March 2nd was the worst, for some reason.
I hadn’t thought about you in weeks
– well, more like afterthoughts,
caprices of a winding/storied memory –
you flashed before me
particle ignoring all matter
I relived the hours together
slowly, not savouring but observing,
your contours more defined
– like a coastline under a satellite
then as through a microscope –
in endless, excruciating precision
the acuteness of the scrutiny
which made me understand, finally
why it had been so hard to go over you.

So I sat there with that mental origami
pleating and creasing ever smaller folds,
each one revealing a finer trait,
and I knew once I would be watching
from the comfort of space
where we always fly for a reason
I would finally see the finest
tales of embroidered memories.

***