Fresh
Things are always better when they’re fresh, right?
Fresh fruit, fresh underwear, fresh coffee, fresh winds, fresh perspective, fresh baked bread, fresh bedding, fresh schedule, fresh relationship, fresh hobby, fresh fish, fresh job, fresh home, fresh start, fresh and clean.
Fresh is nice. All that new bright, filling the space with it’s smell of warm bed sheets from the dryer, and a crusty loaf of foam on the cooling rack in the kitchen, both somehow filling the air in the room with tiny particles of themselves that are then drawn through moist channels to ignite the interest of ganglia who then report to the dark and squishy librarian who responsibly jots down the data, folds it into a little paper dart, and, without even looking up, throws it at the “New Information” bulletin board to be sorted when there’s a break in the action and he’s got the time to catch up on his filing, which he never will because that’s not his department, and he doesn’t even know that because he’s a total amnesiac, and so he also doesn’t know that, since he woke up, he has never stopped, not once, and he has never looked up at the dart board, not once, but if he did, he’d see there was barely anything on it excepting a few long-past sensory experiences of an awakening consciousness, and under that, the completely empty floor beneath that shows, if nothing else, the near fanatical aptitude and vigor of the Department of Memory and Reference.
Explanations are poor things when compared to feelings. There are no words that can bring what you possess, and what you endure, into the kind of focus required to make the translation from spirit to ear, from eye to eye. The biology is simply inadequate, and all efforts to force this sack of viscera and bone to express completely will fail, partially. But you get credit for trying.
Such is life, I guess, and art. Not that there’s a difference. Such is the endless string of failures to explain what happens to me when I set my lips to the crown of my baby daughter’s heads, and breathe in that first breath, the one that will never be exhaled.
There are no words, but I use them anyway, to return every day to that place to long, and to love, and I use them because, if I don’t, a forgetting becomes possible, and the lesson might be lost. I don’t even have to know what the lesson is, I just have to not forget what I am doing.
It’s easy to get diverted by new things. It’s fun, and the process is simple to put into words-unlike those feelings that you can’t describe and have to sit with by yourself-but you’ll never master them until you endure through the process of accepting their normality. There is no craft without drudgery, there is no relationship without distrust, there is no life without a little death.
Fresh fruit is dead to the tree, after all.
But it’s SO GOOD.
