Think less

The first thing I noticed when I arrived home was a cluster of little flowers in the autumn shrubs. They were spry, white-petaled, yellow at the core and sitting softly unbothered amidst a withering blur of brown.

I took a photo of them and stared, searching for an apt sentiment for the vision, admittedly one which was not really about the flowers and rather a transposition of my disoriented state into a quote that subtly begged to be believed. Like a doctors’ deliverance to the mother of a terminally ill child.

Immediately following my self-pacification I’ll delete the sentiment because it will get demoted by the empty half of the glass and then when I come across the dull wash of dirt in my camera roll, I won’t even notice the small flowers anymore and I’ll delete that too. 

I’m watching my friend fall in love and remembering it all.  Her soul as I’ve known it is evanescing and the corners of her mouth and eyelids sit softly and willingly in a new way.  She tells me how she thinks that the only times you’re entirely encased in love is the beginning and the end so in a strange way I am alive as I’ll ever be and my features sit differently now too but when we stand together it is not hard to tell who is over and who just began.

I think repetitive thoughts on the plane and laying in bed and in the shower and under spitting knots in my long chlorine-cured hair out the window of a speeding car.  Thoughts I can’t figure out how to share and that I try to massage into a mold specially suited for a pair of ears miles away…oblivious that this is why I can’t hear them myself, why they come back tirelessly again and again.

I spoke and didn’t say much but sensed I was understood. Or other times I said too much and sensed despite insistent nods that my points were missed. I listened to many songs but a few many more times than the others and I feel very differently about whether life will keep going depending on whether these songs are playing and sometimes I have to pause them and think up inspirational quotes again. I’m leaving fate up to chance and chance up to mildly-sub-conscious impulses and everything I do is both the wrong thing and the only option. I’m trying to decide if what i want is what i want and I’m going in circles about it and I worry that your love is not as unconditional as you think and worry that you wonder the same thing.

But then i think about the flowers again and despite my prediction, when i find the photo in my camera roll I don’t delete it.  I think about what I thought and what I did with what I thought and then i remember about the man who obsesses over his own reflection and the flower that became of him, and how the flower in the story looks much like the ones I spotted in the shrubs.  I think about my friend and the gleam in her pinched eyes and how though our admissions are starkly opposite I couldn’t quite tell you the distinction between the start and the finish because my eyes are still gleaming too and with the same saline glisten that shines amidst our laughter.  And when there is no laughter still I don’t punctuate with periods and commas because the truth is a run on sentence that I am chasing tirelessly, myself the period desperately seeking conclusion, who can never figure out how it’s supposed to end, Fated to realize that maybe it only ever begins.

I don’t know if I am really the man who will become the flower or merely one doomed to acknowledge the flowers’ presence as my own, Or if there is even a difference

But as my last act in his honor, I fall into my reflection with the thought that  I am thinking way too much.