I re­mem­ber as a child being over­whelmed by how many de­tails the world had to offer.
Walk­ing to the tree swing in the front yard, bare feet over tree roots,
Rocks and worms tough­en­ing and tick­ling my soles, ants run­ning through
My toes and around my an­kles, the smells and tastes of dan­de­lions and wild onions,
My hand over the vari­a­tions of tex­ture on the tree and rope my fa­ther had hung.
A few steps off the rough brick and I was a giant in a bright and vis­ceral world.
I re­al­ize now, though, how lit­tle at­ten­tion I pay to what’s below my feet.
And loss of de­tail and loss of a per­cep­tion of some­thing grander have gone hand in hand.
My senses are no longer so en­gaged;
In­stead I feel the need to cap­ture these mo­ments,
To store them away.
I take them in my cupped hand and watch a bub­ble form around them.
They float away into an end­less cham­ber, where I peer at them from a dis­tance.
They move around slowly and serenely, these quiet mo­ments of my dis­en­gaged life.
This dark space is too deep for me to com­pre­hend, so I keep pour­ing in
Anew these mo­ments I want to keep; these echoes of my life; these re­flec­tions
Of my sight and feel­ing.
Slowly I have con­structed this mine of mem­o­ries to live in with my­self.
A large and in­dis­tinct world cre­ated and con­trolled, by me.
To­gether, these mo­ments hold up a mir­ror of my de­sired me;
The only light re­flected;
Tiny fac­sim­i­les of my senses echo­ing through the dark, merg­ing into one imag­ined pic­ture.
I throne my­self here, and I have for­got­ten to look for some­thing grander.
How can I ori­ent my­self in this dark space? With noth­ing to ref­er­ence but the vast
Empti­ness and my own translu­cent float­ing mem­o­ries? To what is my iden­tity tan­gi­bly tied?
In this strange land­scape there is no clear di­rec­tion or pur­pose other than those I cre­ate.
These roam­ing echoes of my re­al­ity re­sound off the solid bound­aries of this world.
What is solid in this dark­ness that I can­not see?
The sounds teach me the depth of my cre­ated world by the length of their re­sound­ing.
The far­ther they echo, the fainter a ver­sion of them­selves they be­come;
The far­ther I step in, the fainter a ver­sion of my­self I be­come.

So that the me that you per­ceive is an as­sem­bly,
A col­lec­tion of ideal mo­ments cu­rated in the dark.