I know you’re out there.
I see you leering there with your little bug-eyed stare, looking me up and down, and I can hear your piggy brain trying to figure out ‘what is she going to do next? Is it going to be interesting? Is this going to be a moment I can capture and savour?
I think that everyone enjoys a little voyeurism now and then.
There’s such a lack of romanticism in the mild watching of others. Is there harm in fascination? Is there harm in romanticizing? Is there harm at all?
Looking down on me like a gargoyle won’t do any one good or bad.
It does flatter a person knowing that you can be such a specimen worthy of a little time and attention. But it feels vulnerable.
As if I’m a supple peach and your eyes are knives and if your gaze comes too close you can reach the bitter pit in the sweetness.
Time does weird things to people.
It’s possible to look back on days and time and wonder what happened to make things so different in such little time. Sometimes I lie in bed just asking for it to stop, so I can have the tiniest breath of air or I can make sense of how fast the days go by. But, they’re all the same. The days, the people, the thoughts. No, time doesn’t stop for anyone.
Closest thing we have is a moment of realisation and that you scramble to sop up the time you have left on a good day like dipping stale bread in soup.
It doesn’t work most times. It doesn’t make the bread taste any better.
It is still as stale as can be because you forgot about the good days when they were actually happening, and as you were complaining about the summer-heat bleeding into October it turned into a rainy November and then it is a cold-of-steel January.
And that January is filled with promise of hope and resolutions that are written down in the beginning of your crisp diary with dots instead of lines—because, that is what the kids have nowadays—and you begin another year in which you seemingly run after time and moments past. And it’s not until the summer gets spiced with a touch of autumn that you remember that you’ve wasted another year on indecision.
…
Time is funny that way.
But I think you know that.
Don’t you?
Jasmijn Ooms
paratextmag.com 