AMnesIa: NOT THE PEBBLE?

To love this pain untainted by the masochism of the martyr, I might (instead) draw broad circles of expanded poignancy that like the pebble in the pond--neither sentimental nor gratuitous--enclose my soul in the potency of this moment, this life, my power to effect, to touch, to change, to move...  

But, invariably, I shake my head.  I am uncertain of this trajectory.  Everybody knows this, sees it in me; they see it in themselves in the two tiny pictures of fear and regret that are mirrored back from the curved black horizon of my (truant) pupils, my eyes.  

I will forget more than most of them will ever learn.  I have already forgotten most that I was taught.  And yet...

And yet  it is impossible for me to let go of, lose, lessen the original scar of knowledge  I ascribe the accidental knowledge a reverence and primacy that might suggest I suffer that delusion,  "All of these things were whispered directly in my ear on the breath and voice of God.  

These things (ideas, philosophies, these notions that) I stumbled on still matter.  The enlightenment I bought myself from my meanderings in libraries, my conversations in bars,  my drunken late-night readings, my sober morning thoughts, have patched my oft deflated soul, or sutured up the wormholes in my heart. We are nothing, less than cold stones, less conscious, of less purpose (unto ds ourselves) perhaps, but more consequence that we care to confess (to ourselves).  

I struggle with the guilt, that blame and blam and glamorous pain of the intersection.  I do not like the lazy equating of influence with responsibility.  We make too little of the water, its stillness, its patient mutability, our reflections as we fall out of the sky.  We tumble from the heaven of our mother's security, our father's love, and drop, glazed with sunlight, our golden youth, head first into the bursting surface, the exuberance of our beings before and after what is now.