...the story...

This was one of those moments.

Those moments that you don't even know exist until they happen to you…

"And this was one of those moments", she would tell others in years to come. Those moments when suddenly the bottom drops out and everything around you simply fades away. And miraculously you're still there…suspended.  As though weightless, without form, without need for structure - for support - for gravity.  And you blink, thinking it's just a momentary hallucination. But as your eyes flicker closed and open again you realize that nothing has changed and everything has changed, and nothing will ever be the same again and yet everything continues on just the same.  And you gasp as though suddenly there's pain that you can't endure. So you stop. You stop and you hold your breath and you hug your own arms tightly, oh so tightly. 

There's a droning in the air. A buzzing or drumming or sound...just sound.  No note...no tune...no tempo...just, sound.

You can hear the jangle of the phone ringing, the phone on the wall in the kitchen…the phone you must have just hung up. But when? How? Why? It blasts through the thickness discordantly yet you can't pick it up. Your hand grasps frantically at air.  But you can't grab anything. 

Around you everything seems to pulsate back into being as your own heartbeat overrides the pause, and yet you aren't really in it. There's the floor. But you're just sort  of floating over it. There's the framework of the world around you.  Yet none of it has any substance.

And people. Oh, the people.

Still walking and talking and being… 

busy. 

And none of them seem to notice that everything has changed and that you are floating… 

Impossibly, improbably… And completely unrecognized.

You shake your head. That little jostle of putting things to rights. Eyes closed. Open them once more and suddenly there it all is. Everything back right where it was. 

And only you are missing.  

"Don't worry", she'll say.

Don't worry, because if it happens to you, you just keep going. 

That's how it happens.

You just keep going.

It's like learning to do anything else. Only you are not learning to do. You're just learning to be. Because that's what you must do. You must learn how to be all over again because the one you were before is gone.

"And sometimes", she'll say, "it feels like you're forgetting your lines or dropping your props." That's it, you see. It feels a bit like a play. Because you're not you.  Just a character inside a shell that looks like you and moves like you and sounds like you but is still...

missing.

writing myself into the story of each day