When a film's heroine innocently coughs, you know that two scenes later, at most, she'll be in an oxygen tent; when a man bumps into a woman at the train station, you know that man will become the woman's lover and/or murderer. In everyday life, where we cough often and are always bumping into people, our daily actions rarely reverberate so lucidly. Once we love or hate someone, we can think back and remember that first casual encounter. But what of all the chance meetings that nothing ever comes of? While our bodies move ever forward on the time line, our minds continuously trace backwards, seeking shape and meaning as deftly as any arrow seeking its mark.
    Our fates were already perfectly mapped out within us, just as we once waited perfectly inside of our mothers, who themselves were held within the depths of their mothers, our great-grandmothers.
    It's impossible for me not to wonder why I didn't go right when I should have gone left, or, alternatively, see my movements as inexorable. If the cancer was already there, it would have been discovered eventually, though probably too late. Or perhaps that knock set in motion a chain of physical events that created an opportunity for the cancer to grow which it might not otherwise have found. Sometimes it is as difficult to know what the past holds as it is to know the future, and just as an answer to a riddle seems so obvious once it is revealed, it seems curious to me now that I passed through all those early moments with no idea of their weight.

GOO GOO DOLLS - FEEL THE SILENCE

 

You lie awake at night
With blue eyes that never cry
All you remember now
Is what you feel

The truth remains
In midnight conversations
I asked for this moment
But you turned away

Sad like a lonely child
Broken the day you're born
I held the light to you
But I was so vain

And you remain
A promise unfulfilled
I ask you for more
But you push me away

And if we feel the silence
Holding this all inside
Everything means more now than
Words could explain

And if we feel the silence
Holding this all inside us
Looking for something more to say

I don't know where I'm going
Only know where I been
But you move through my soul like a hurricane wind
We've been so lost for so long
I don't know how to get back again

And we're drowning in the water
That flows under this bridge
When you're fighting the current
You forget how to live
And I wanted to reach you but I don't know where to begin
And you remain
A promise unfulfilled until today

And if we feel the silence
Holding this all inside
Everything means more now than
Words could explain
And if we feel the silence
Leaving this all behind us
When it's gone what will you say

How do we hold on
How do we hold on
How do we hold on
How do we hold on
How do we hold on

You lie awake at night
With blue eyes that never cry

All I want is to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time. But there's no place like that in the world. Which is why I'm living here, in this world where things are continually damaged, where the heart is fickle, where time flows past without a break. I thought there had to be a place like that in the world. I was sure somewhere I'd run across the entrance that would take me to that other world.