Disappearing Ink

How simple a thing it is to rewrite history. How very many times I have already done it. With the addition of time and experience and perspective and cold, hard fact -- nothing is ever what it seems. Things don't remain as they were. Change gets in like unwanted moisture and spoils your favorite shoes. You can take a photograph today and then look at it again a few years from now, and it may very well be a photograph of something entirely different than what it was when you first took it. I feel as if everything in the world is being passed through a great, vicious sieve. And meaning gets lost in the scramble.

I am not good at leaving things behind. The network of my personal reference base begins to take on such an air of complexity and overcrowding that I barely have time to have a thought before I endow it with the meaning of a thousand previous thoughts. Bestow on it the mantel of the sum of my experience. Inject the whole of history and a few flashes of popular culture. Will anything that happens to me ever happen in the vacuum of the moment? Also, while I'm inquisitive, is it ever possible to be sure?

Caring for other creatures kindles warmth in me. I welcome such things when they become opportune. But few other corporeal beings could benefit from attuning themselves to the frenzied rhythms of my heart and mind. Surely, other living things are intended to sleep the night through.