painful in their beauty

The oldest is certainly my favorite. Around the time it was imprinted, I didn’t really know anything…it was my first memory upon awaking from an eternity of non-existance, and it goes as follows;

My eyes slowly blink open and I’m looking at a maple tree canopy. It is a surreal foreground against an even more surreal background of blue and white. My tiny body is wrapped in comfort, and knowlege of movement is non-existant. I can only lay on my back (though I don’t even know that’s what I’m doing) and look up (though I don’t even know where up is). The breeze that stimulates my face, the smell of wet northern country, the leaves, and the sky, are all that there is. At that point I didn’t even understand my own existance… and it was heaven.

The rest usually have at least something in common with this one, as well as a mental quintessence of their own. Time seems to make them more berable; sweeter somehow. For all have one thing in common.. the fact that they will never be immediately experienced in anything but a retro-thought.

The world is the bright yellow orange of a youthful summer, with time sharpened contrast. I’m surrounded by the warm comfort of the sun, and an emmotional companion. The woman next to me is dressed in white, a body known so well that I could have called it my own. Our feet are buried in the sand of a creek-bed, side by side, two pairs of feet belonging to one person. I snatch a frog from the water and present it to her, as a cave-man-esque offering to my mate, and it is her face when I offer it to her that will not let me be… her eyes are curious, innocent, warm, and kind. Her mouth is twisted into an adorable and unusual expression of wonder and appreciation, and at that moment I was truely happy to be standing there with her.. and with the path I wanted to take her down, into a place of comfort and peace… set against the bright yellow orange world of a youthfull summer…

When that memory surfaces I squint my eyes, ball my fists into my ears, and swallow hard. But it comes anyway. How is it I can have such little say in what I do, and do to others? Why don’t I have any free will? Alas… In God I trust.