Deckard

Somewhere between the darkness and the rain is a place in your mind where all the languages you know or at least pretend to understand mingle together. It's a place you find after the day is finished, when all you really want is to enjoy your dinner in peace. Your thoughts move beneath you, pluming towards the sky like flames emitting from factories that never close. Fires that are necessary to the drive that keeps you moving forward, yet like all memories -- made from flames that can easily engulf your focus if you were to get too close.

So you fly above. Try to make it part of the background.

I rarely turn the lights on when I'm at home by myself. Between computer screens, the flicker of the television, and the world moving outside my window there's usually enough illumination for me to survive by. I don't really know when I started that habit -- but it's become such a reflex that I hardly even notice that I'm doing it any more.

Of course this time of year when the night comes earlier the shadows are longer, stretching and fading across old photographs, books that we both love, and CD's that you've sent me. Their presence is a comfort to me. A context that keeps those nights alive in my mind. Not that I would forget, but ever since you moved off-world having these reminders close keeps them alive in a manner more than if they were just an image in my mind.

Just because we can dream of the unicorn doesn't mean we can actually live in the moment with it.

Which might make some wonder where that dream came from, or even if it were real to begin with..

So you keep things close. You wear the bracelets until the colored threads wear out. Not because they have power themselves but because the objects keep you actively connected to the memories of the source. A band wrapped around your wrist almost serving as a cocoon around your mind, keeping the past alive in the present almost as if you were replicating the moment.

Unfortunately, a replicant only has so long to exist.

Last night, sitting in the dark -- emails to be read, movie images flashing by; the room coated in subtle shades of blue and yellow, driven each by their own sources, then meeting in the middle of the room as something less than where they began -- except in this case the effect is desired. Direct light is harsh. Demanding.

The television is on, but the sound is down. Voices in the background -- sufficient to hear, but not enough to distract. It's a welcome comfort, like hearing rain against the window without having to get wet. You sink into it, like a warm bath or a favorite couch, hoping to escape the stresses of the day and eventually transition into a place where the night can become it's own animal -- independent and free.

It's like folding paper. The result has beauty, but it's the process that creates the calm.

Which is perhaps why I was so caught off guard when I absently looked out the window of my second story apartment and caught sight of a brightly-colored blimp flying in the distance, it's sides illuminated by some sort of projection screen playing advertisements for the company who's name was written on the side.

After the initial surprise, part of me immediately began connecting the circuits in search for an explanation, thinking of reasons why a blimp might be there and if any of those things were happening right now.

But I swear, the very first thought that came
to my mind was that I had woken up in a movie.

I tried to take a picture of it to help illustrate the reality, but the best I could manage was a blurry blue point on an otherwise black background. Impulses and electrons, not enough even to create the illusion of reality.

Certainly not enough for a skinjob to pass as real.

And yet, sometimes it's not hard to wonder if it's not reality we crave, but the completeness of the aesthetic that we're looking to find. The idea that even if we know that our world spins around another star, the events in our own lives to some extent all revolve around our own perceptions and reactions to them. That our feelings and desires are at the center of our world -- which would offer some explanation for why I like to listen to sad songs when I'm feeling down, or why the approach of a holiday built on love and happiness only lately tends to make me more attuned to feelings of sadness and isolation, despite the fact that I know in my mind and my heart that I'm not alone at all.

It's just that sometimes despite the fact that there's a joy in having each memory to cherish and hold, there's a weight that comes when you realize that all you can do ..is remember.

In other words, It's a shame those memories can't live forever.

..But then again, who does?

[Listening to:   Angel City – "Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again?" ]