for loren to read :)

THE PAST

The past is not something that I think about. The past is something that I feel. It creeps up on me like a great and sudden wave, seizing me before I have time to hold my breath. It forces me under its icy grasp in a single, clean swoop. I don't know when it's coming. A wave of memory is not so courteous that it will wait until you are alone before it pounces; it will strike when and where ever, though usually when it is most inconvenient. 

Yet once I am under, I am not panicked or scared or hurt. I feel peaceful. I am inside a dream. Under the wave, the past plays out like an old home video. I can’t tell if time has sped up or slowed down; it runs at a completely different pace to the present. Soft golds, vibrant blues and shocking reds flood me. The colours are so bright and so real that they make my eyes water, rendering the image to a blur of beautiful colours and distant shapes. Everyone that I see is happy; completely and eternally. Every moment lasts exactly as long as I want it to; nothing ends to soon and nothing takes too long.

I can see my family; my mother, my father, my sisters and my wife. My mother is preparing salad; she slices every vegetable as though it were delivered from the garden of Eden itself. In the backyard, my father holds a pair of silver tongs in one hand and a beer in the other. Shirtless and tanned, he listens to the meat sizzle on the barbeque. He looks at me, as though looking at the camera and his face illuminates. There is so much light. Bright rays seep from the sky, my father’s smile, his eyes, and from the very earth itself. He gestures for me to join him, and together we turn the sausages and steak. It’s so simple; cooking food for our family, and yet nothing could be more important, more fulfilling. I feel like I exist just for this moment.
My two sisters, still young, are a picture of innocence. The backyard is a flurry of creamy skin and white cotton as they dance, run and do cartwheels. Every time they leave the ground, it looks like they stay in the air for just a moment too long. I almost believe that they’re flying, it’s just that nobody stopped to watch them long enough to notice. 
On the veranda sits my wife. She is so, so beautiful. Her cheeks are a rosy pink, as though she was blushing at the confronting beauty of life itself. Who knew that these very same cheeks would later turn deep red, then violent purple, then a cold white? Her stomach is big and round. I put my hand to the bulge as though I could reach right through her skin to the tiny baby inside. I want to touch it and hold it. I want to protect it.

Then, as abruptly as the wave pulled me under, it pulls me back out. I break the water’s surface with great speed, gasping loudly for air. The past has the ability to release you from it’s grasp just as quickly as it forced you into it.