the then and now

The lights are a wash of color framing the windowpane, a fluid glow, insistent in the darkness. Chain of light comprised of light itself - it is impossible to sleep with this brilliance in front of me. That glass box of memories is bathed in a faint reflection of color, and the scene changes imperceptibly - a change felt rather than heard or seen, a change sensed because nothing has really changed but my own perception. I see the glass box differently, back when the memories weren't memories, but reality. Then the lights were blue 'round the windowpane; that hypnotic blue glow was an otherwordly luminescence, an allure, a pull, the utter impossibility of unconsciousness. I strain to see it, to feel it as it was then, to slip fully into the recesses of memory, but I am deflected against an invisible barrier, and the whole feeling is fleeting. Just a flicker of memory, a fragment. I look for all the fragments in the hope I can put them all together, join all the pieces, though I know I will always be looking. I stand in a place, immerse myself in years of familiarity, and come up with a single moment in a seemingly past life. Funny these fragments are so easy to relive but so hard to find. Funny they come back to me and it is as if I have known them all along. Strange but so, so beautiful, becoming a part of the place as to unexpectedly fall through it into the transverses of time, into the same place, so long ago, into the makings of a memory.