Afternoon in autumn

We grow older. We may think we’re cheating time. Especially when we give up the drugs and get in all that exercise and clean living, but the truth is there in the mirror if we only move a little closer to the glass. Always planning, that’s it isn’t it, the planning, imagining better and better situations into futurity. Once I wrote an easy comment on a weblog dismissing those who live for love. But I forgot to add a postscript. The one that reads: when it’s a minute to four on any given Sunday afternoon in Autumn and the rain has been constant since morning and the light is falling fast, a feeling like the very last birthday of childhood passes in sudden flashes through me. It passes through me with a radiance that lights up chamber after chamber in memory’s castle. And priceless lantern slides rise from dusty trays in love’s time-honoured chests. It passes behind each frame, projecting visions of another life. One with different meaning to this one. A hand. And fingers. And fingertips against mine.