The International Writers Magazine: TImes and Memories- a short story

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That “Time” Of Year • Mike Blake So many skies, so many settings, so many scenes, he thinks, as they fall and crumble and retreat somewhere back in his head on yet another bright spring morning, another day in good health years after those pictures from the past (music from the past there too) were living, breathing scenes.

Years doesn’t even seem like the right word for it (Since when do we ever get the handle on time?). Years, tears, fears, all washed away, and only certain pictures remain. Certain images and details. Colors. Smells. A scattering. Johnny Appleseed, tossing your past to the wind. Pieces of you from here and there.
            He scavenges through them, occasionally thrilled by a find. Moved. There is nothing wrong with feeling something, he thinks. That’s what spring mornings like this were made for. Another renewal after the cold stillness of winter. Another “coming out”, and he doesn’t mind being strengthened by his past – the roots beneath the new shoots, so to speak. The closest thing to wisdom that a man can have.
            How many books does he carry in him? How many characters or personalities? How much variety in the conglomeration?  He is his own Frankenstein sewn together over the years, patched with this and that, his life’s juices coming from different nozzles. He always did open his arms to inspiration in its many guises, even if he did sometimes get hurt in his search. He had learned years before not to shun any potential source of inspiration; a spiritual touch could come anywhere, at anytime. And then – one of his kicks in life – his imagination could take it from there.
            So much has played in his head’s cinema, so many short flicks and features, a combination of all genres – a veritable movie house for dreams and fantasy, something Hollywood can’t and never will touch, something that celebrity faces and gestures have no part of. In the end, it is something that sustains. All that a man has. Or does he?
            And here he comes back to time again, and what is had and lost, gained and given up. And the nature of reality. Questions that have and always will be around.
            He knows that, personally, in his own quest for “freedom”, that he has tried to do away with time altogether – at times. To live for the present moment, and that moment alone. No thought to the past or future. A man open to his present impressions only, “free” from any hindrances from the past, or distressing forecasts for the future. A man adrift in the moment, unencumbered. An ethereal presence, almost. For the body remembered things, too.
            No matter, he wanted to absorb the “here and now”. Although what was the here and now if it had nothing to do with time?
            It is on warm, bright spring mornings such as this that he can laugh at the seemingly endless questions that stream through his head like the small brook running by his feet. He is reassured in his good feeling: by that clear blue sky, and the clear, fast running water, the birds calling, the breeze in the air; even the distant sound of traffic on the highway. Life is busy, inside and out.
©  M. Blake May 2005
mablake63@cox.net

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