... (best, 2020)

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It’s like there are these moments,
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As if I’m standing upon a pond,
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Upon still water -
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Soundless,
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Motionless -
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And I’m just standing there
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In what feels most like a center.
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When everything around me
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Revolves,
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Like a spider’s web set in motion
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Or like a kaleidoscope, that’s been dialed in.
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When the weight of the wind,
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And silent wings,
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And the step of an insect
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Or the sound of a distant engine -
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The approach of some animal,
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Its look of recognition,
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Its pause and coinciding departure -
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Become just elements of that the same center.
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To be sure, I am not the source in these revolutions -
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The world doesn’t seem to revolve around me -
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It just feels, instead, as if I’ve found it somehow,
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That I’ve just discovered its existence
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And that I’m standing in the middle of it -
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All while remaining, simultaneously,
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As some symptomatic part of it.
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There are these times,
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These moments,
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When the spinning wheel just clicks into place -
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Like an intricate machine,
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Or like an eclipse -
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And rainfall descends upon the stillness;
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Where the pond gives way to ripples,
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Thousands,
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Millions,
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So many in their multiplicity
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That their number must near infinity -
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So many, as though it feels
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As if they’ve fallen there before,
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In that exact way,
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In that exact fashion,
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And in that same, exact place;
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Where the vision of their happening last
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Haunts its sudden happening now,
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And all over while,
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The drops just go rippling out.
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In these moments,
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These times,
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It feels as if I seem to know,
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To intuit,
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Quantity has become beyond me -
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That it is not in my design to understand them at all,
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To know them beyond the sensation of their being there -
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As if my sight could only conceive a single fall at a time,
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And as though, fast as I might try to look,
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It’s not within me to see them all.
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There appear stories, in the ripples,
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Things I can’t envision but believe somehow to be there -
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Faces and places,
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Feelings, wanting,
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Loss and violence,
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Tragedy, grief,
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Precise joy,
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Satisfaction,
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Redemption,
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Resignation -
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The abandonment of tapestry
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And the loom of woven string.
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There are these moments
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That I just can’t escape,
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That I stumble across
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And am caught within,
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That seem to feel, just like that -
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Or at least,
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Seem as close to my attempt at describing them
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As I think they could possibly get.
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It weighs like fate, somehow,
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And yet fate implies an ending -
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A story implies an arc,
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A narrative,
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A purpose,
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A line,
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But there aren’t any lines at all.
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There is only the pond,
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Apparent innumerability
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And a centrific sensation,
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A motion,
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Within a timeless rippling -
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Holisticity, in synchronicity -
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That I must lack the means to see beyond.
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Author's Note

I’m rarely satisfied with first person iterations, they feel conceited somehow (too predicated on self experience) but I’ve been wanting to write the rippling pond image for quite some time, and this is the best it’s ever gotten.

I expect this idea may later become a short, though I first have to figure out how to plot it while avoiding excessive abstraction.