duetto

What happens to someone after four years
of leaving no mark? Just drifting through, untouched.
Not one or two, but four. Perhaps it was his words
and reading them in blackandwhite that hurt, while
also needing time to examine why. This, coupled
with my ever-inept sense of timing in finally wanting
to be seen by him, this irony. How the depth
of this emotion surprises me and is the thing
that finally shook me from a foggy drawn-out sleep,
the thing that lifted such a thick-and-heavy veil
of inertia.

Unintentionally or not, his words have pushed
my sensibility beyond those self-imposed walls,
as if a large door has forced its way open,
a long gust of cold air inadvertently stirring
up a sea of sobering self-awareness. The absurdity
of my ideas, of how easy it is to submerge oneself
in them and the disturbing thought of losing what
one never actually had. To become somehow emptied
by this prospect, by an unexplainable grief for
nothing really, nothing that means everything.
How every action affects so many others.
This cascade.

In a completely unrelated sense,
my reflections on seeing S again still linger.
While in the gym, our chance encounter.
Unexpected small talk as if something mattered,
telling me about his practice, while all I could
see was an overriding fatigue in his eyes,
the light that I once knew now extinguished.
Perhaps work has worn him down. One too many
strangers' problems stuffed inside his head
that obscure the light, causing the kind of
dim flame that trips and tricks the soul.

I knew him when the thrill of art and medicine
excited us. When the thought of this combination
lit him up. It was not so much his Hippocrates
juxtaposed with my Da Vinci; that's obvious.
But his Thomas Szasz to my Giacometti, and yes,
his Puccini to my Satie. The porcelain tea set,
hand-picked while in Hong Kong, and the jade
necklace that his mother specifically designed
for me, the one I lost but somehow managed
to redesign myself. They remain.
But nothing more than that.

So these two unrelated events; no lingering trace
of vulnerability left for one I once knew so well,
but so much for another whom I don't.
And in this, there is no logic.

Awakening
the
shivering
dawn
of
a
new
year
.