Sitting in a graveyard,
Surrounded by bones from the past,
None seen,
But barely beneath the surface.
How the now of me gets snapped, like a fragile twig.
I shouldn't have read that line.
Or if I read it, I shouldn't have remembered it.
Or if I remembered it, I shouldn't have absorbed it,
Seen it in only one certain way,
Sucked it in as though I only wanted to feed the force that snaps me when nothing shows me how to bend.
How to bend.
How the golden tide that sweeps over me is so easily overcome by the purple fog that billows in from nowhere.
And then, suffocating in its wretched fumes, I snap.
Sitting amongst the ranks of markers—the only living thing.
And where, outnumbered by the monuments, mortality counts for nothing.
Then from out of the same nowhere that the past erupts, from the same nowhere that the purple fog blows up, from the same nowhere that the snapping force takes me unaware, a stranger smiles, turns his palms upwards and says how nice it is now.
Now! Now!
How nice it is now.
Amongst these remnants of the past he tells me, palms upturned, how nice it is now.
‘It’s nice now,’ he says. ‘So nice now.’
Thank you stranger, who I will never see again, and who will one day be marked in some such place as this, thank you for reminding me that it is so nice now, so very nice now.
Thank you for reminding me of now.
