Mood Pieces January 26 2018

He wasn't sure how long he had been there, it felt like maybe an hour but the stiffness in his body told him it had likely been much longer. However long he spent in that park though he simply couldn’t make it speak to him. Not like it used to. Not like he needed it to.

There was a time, not so long ago, when this park was his favorite place in the world. Memories, filled with love and laughter, warm sunlight and cool night breezes. This had been a steady constant in his life, but now, now it felt like a stranger to him. It was more than just the park that had changed, it was everywhere. Well, everywhere that mattered. Movie theaters he went to, streets he walked down, even many of the friends that still took the time to throw a conversation his way. All of them were suddenly so grey and lifeless, like a pane of fogged glass had been thrust between him and the world he remembered.

People had asked after him, of course, like he supposed they were bound to. At first they had seemed concerned, tried to give advice and to cheer him up with one thing or another. It hadn't worked. Of course it hadn't worked. What did they expect him to do with phantoms and mists? He imagined he was probably nearing the end of people's sense of propriety; most had given up already and the few who hadn't had fallen back on mechanical well-meaning prattle. It wasn’t their fault though. They didn’t know any better. Couldn’t know any better, he knew. He never figured out how to talk about her to other people though; not when she was around, and definitely not now when she was...not. She had always been outside of words for him.

He'd heard a story once. A parable maybe? He could never remember the difference. A man who was born without sight undergoes a new medical procedure that gives him back his vision after a lifetime without it. But while the operation goes flawlessly the man is disappointed. He'd heard so many stories about the things he couldn’t see before, the things he could now suddenly see, but the one that had always fascinated him the most was light, and he couldn’t find it. Friends tried to explain to him that light wasn't something you really saw on its own, it was what let you see in the first place. It was what gave everything its colors and shades in the first place, that he could see at all was proof the light was there. Light was the very source of beauty in the world. No matter how they tried to convince him, though, the man would not believe that they hadn't pulled some sort of elaborate joke at his expense. For all his new eyes had given him, he simply could not see.

She had been something like that. She had always lit up everything around her. Had made the colors richer, the sounds sweeter, the future brighter. He once believed that he had seen beautiful places, heard magnificent music, tasted wonderful food; that these things were somehow his, in his mind. Now though. Now, it was as if all the light had been drained from the world around him. As if the whole universe had been celebrating her existence and he had simply been blessed enough to be in the same room. Again he was blind. All the more so after having been given the briefest moment of true sight. He couldn’t explain that to other people, couldn’t tell them that all the color had drained out of the world, that everything they thought they saw was only a dim reflection of the world he knew. How could he possibly tell it to them, when he had never found the words to tell it to her?

Shaking out his stiff limbs he began to make a languid sort of way down one of the paths, a path he knew too well, anymore. Perhaps the world would never speak to him again, he thought, perhaps he should try to forget that things had ever been anything but sepia toned. Perhaps. Lost to thought his mind began to wander, and his feet, unbidden, began to trace again a distant memory of light and sound