I Am What I Am, But I Ain't What I Used To Be

I remember a darkness, real, yet stirred with a thousand fireflies, perhaps my earliest recollected encounter with true wonder.

The mosquito trucks crawled through at dusk and left behind a moving cloud embroidered with the bright fragments of skreeing children.

Even then two people armed with nothing but sticks could have a good time, could make music, could poke out each other’s eyes, could destroy a hundred lives, could start either a fire or a war that would last a lifetime.

We didn’t exactly understand that, of course. There was no way we could know that there would come a day when one of us would find himself wandering the halls of a detox ward in hospital pajamas, shivering, his face a blister, a seemingly permanent grimace. Or that another of our old, happy neighborhood tribe, so afraid he would end up just like all the other people on the planet, would allow himself to become so different that he could no longer look even his closest friends in the eye.

Couldn’t we all try to remember how magical we once thought our time in this world was going to be? How magical it once was?

Do me a big favor: Take a good look around and tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?

I’ll sit right here and wait for the fog to burn off, for the music to work its way back in, and for the words to once again start moving in me like a dance, like a dance that doesn’t even know it’s dancing.