THE ENDLESSNESS

At first I was lonely, but then I was

curious. The original fault was that I could

not see the lines of things. My mother could.

She could see shapes and lines and shadows,

but all I could see was memory, what had been

done to the object before it was placed on

the coffee table or the nightstand. I could sense

that it had a life underneath it. Because

of this, I thought I was perhaps bad at seeing. Even

color was not color, but a mood. The lamp was

sullen, a candlestick brooding and rude with its old

wax crumbling at its edges, not flame, not a promise

of flame. How was I supposed to feel then? About

moving in the world? How could I touch anything

or anyone without the weight of all of time shifting

through us? I was not, or I did not think I was, making

up stories, it was how the world was, or rather it is how

the world is. I've only now become better at pretending

that there are edges, boundaries, that if I touch

something it cannot always touch me back.