Tubby, vain, middle aged, broke, the light bouncing off my head, numb through the general joylessness of it all and below ground level under the watchful eye of technology, I make a secret vow—my personality shifting with violence like magma somewhere way below.
Often, the moment I arrive at work, or anywhere, really, I fix upon an object or point of interest like a wildflower growing out of a wall, say, or some ordinary thing or other with great conviction to embed it in my mind, thinking, this moment, don’t forget this moment right now. Later, upon my return to this same place, the time spent, I wonder about experience quickly turning to reflection and why I should ever fret about events between the start and finish of anything or anything after that. Even the absence of joy. Absolute joy! sudden and unlike anything.
I once made a resolution to only laugh when genuinely amused and three days into the new year failed the first day back at work. I felt a clawing spitefulness in my throat and mourned the burying of my personality in order to get on and eventually came to realise the more I observed a particular thing in a particular place with any kind of concentration to evaluate time, the more time seemed to collapse between that time and the time I came back and looked again, as if the point was always to observe that almost nothing had happened at all, as though I had arrived and I had left at the same moment, with more or less the same thoughts in my head.
© 2022 PM BROWNE
