Water under the bridge
I seem to have lost two of my closest friends this summer. The strange thing is that I do not seem to feel sad about it. I seem to be lacking the appropriate emotions, I hardly feel anything at all.
It is as if my life has taken on a new color, from a misty dim blue to a flamboyant and fiery orange. The things I kept and cherished suddenly seem so unsignificant, the laughes so hollow, the former camaraderie so splintered and frail.
Was it all just a dream? Have I just awoken, yet again fresh to a brave new world? Am I, like Edna Montpellier, too facing The Great Awakening, but without the firm movement of the pen of Chopin to guide me?
My mind is fragile, still dazed with sleep, and confused by the reality it now faces, but yet more solid and genuine than ever before. I know that I am awake, and that what I have lost was, although alluring and beautiful, never more than an illusion.
I mourn - I do - but for some reason not the things I have lost, but instead the things that will never be and somehow never were. What I thought of as natural an genuine now seems so undeniably distant, and what lies ahead of me exceedingly intriguing. For once I do not know anything about the future. For once I am completely out of control, and yet back in control in the same time, like a captain steering his ship across the unruly wawes of the mightiest storm of the year, the only thing challenging the roaring winds is his bellowing laughter. There is control in chaos, just as there can be chaos in control.
I know that now.
I will keep one thing. One single memory, that still carries a hint of sweet innocense and bliss. A tiny fragment of an existence where trouble cannot reach, and where complications and conflicts are unfamiliar concepts.
I will keep, and remember.
Take this kiss upon the brow!
and, in parting from you now,
thus much let me avow:
You are not wrong who deem
that my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
in a night, or in a day,
in a vision, or in none,
is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream.
- A Dream Within A Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe