Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.

It occurred to me, as the heavy curtains were opened and the morning light flooded the small dining area, that without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.

Personally, I’m not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can’t things be just as they are?

Such things that disappear in time that we find ourselves longing to see again. We search for them in close-up, as we search for our hands in a dream.

Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.

Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know.

Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.

How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?

The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.

In time we often become one with those we once failed to understand.

I climbed the fourteen steps to my bedroom, turned off the light, and lay there awake. I was thinking about how New York City at night is like a stage set… I was thinking about how much I love this city.

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.

These are modern times, I told myself. But we are not trapped in them. We can go where we like, communing with angels, to reprise a time in human history more science fiction than the future.

Images have their way of dissolving and then abruptly returning, pulling along the joy and pain attached to them like tin cans rattling from the back of an old-fashioned wedding vehicle.

Some things are not lost but sacrificed.

Why is it that we lose the things we love, and things cavalier cling to us and will be the measure of our worth after we’re gone?

Our lost things returning to the places from where they came, to their absolute origins: a crucifix to its living tree or rubies to their home in the Indian Ocean. The genesis of my coat, made from fine wool, spinning backwards through the looms, onto the body of a lamb, a black sheep a bit apart from the flock, grazing on the side of a hill. A lamb opening its eyes to the clouds that resemble for a moment the woolly backs of his own kind.

Perhaps it’s not where we are going but just that we go.