afterlife

My life could've added up to something if I had only held on to the various things that I thought at the time didn't matter.
The things I didn't think I needed.  The loose change I took for granted.  

You lose these things in short slips.  A gradual slide.  
A series of dismissive gestures.   There is no cataclysmic event to mark their passing.  
No apocalypse or revelation.
It's just a gentle gasp of time.  A blink of days.  
A dream awoken from in tears.  
Sight and mind are a captive state that you can find no way out of.

I remember catching leaves as they blew off a tree in fall.  
Rainfall was an invitation to play.  As was snow.  As was ice.  
The heat.  The cold.  
There was never a wrong time, never a wrong place.  
Every moment always contained something for me to make of it.  

There was always trouble, always problems, fighting, violence, and pain;
but there was also this unrelenting resilience.  
I could cry then wipe the tears quickly and move on to the promise of the next moment.  
The pain was harsh, sharp, and brutal,
but it was a solitary infliction; an isolated incident that ended exactly when it ended.  

But at some point pain began to take on a reverb...an echo.  
Memory took over and made all present senses and perceptions invalid and secondary.  
People were replaced with ghosts.  
A filter fell that refracted everything into distorted misinterpretations of a past that no longer exists.  
I'm responding to things that are no longer happening.  
Defending myself against threats that are no longer present.  
My whole life is a delayed reaction.  An afterlife in purgatory.

that which sleeps always eventually awakes