I - A Life In Time

The snow was as loud as my love for her was alive, and the more I
tried to ignore the volume of the flakes that fell around me, the more
they gathered into a deafening white scream. The sparkle on their
surface from the glow of the streetlight was frosty, warm, and chilled
me to the bone. She said "peace..." in my mind, and hunks of ice formed
and hung from my clothing reflecting a rainbow with colors screaming her name.

We live in the same town and drive the same roads, and I wonder as I
sing along with my mix tape if she felt at peace as she passed the ice
cream stand I now glance at on my way to work. And the small oak trees
to the side of the road next to this red light, surrounding this
intersection...they are alive, they have seen her and she has seen them.
Every day she drives by them, and every day she sits at this
intersection on her way home. This red light and these oak trees know more
of her days than I ever will, and as I hit the gas, I laugh at myself
for feeling a slight jealousy towards these silently observing, unfeeling objects.

Every second we had spent together, a slideshow ran in my head that
moved with us constantly. Every word or action we carried out in the
present somehow imprinted these visions of the future that
overwhelmed my mind. It tortured me, and it elated me. It showed me
what could be, what might be. We looked at a puppy in the window of a
shabby pet store, and as she wished aloud that she could save it from
such a pit, in my head there we were in our future backyard burying a frail
12-year-old version of that puppy together, mourning the loss of our
loyal companion. These weren't just fantasies, they were very real
glimpses of a future taking place at that very moment, on some other
level of time and space we had not yet caught up to. She was the rest of my
life right here in the present, both of them merging into the very moment at hand. I saw these unsnapped pictures and unlived memories with every second that went by, like a movie in my head. I watched it as we walked down the street, hands hanging by our sides inches apart, wishing I could feel the soft creases of her knuckles.