The Fading Summer


            I try to outline the shadows stuck with me this summer, but my fading spirit makes me draw outside the lines. I want to fill in every single color I’ve seen but I can’t help it that I was born colorblind. I want to connect all these pieces but they all look broken as they surround me.
            Will these be footnotes? Will they be distant echoes? Will they be like the beautiful contrail in the sky on a summer evening? Drifting until it’s gone?
            I’ve taken notes and made memories and tried to carve these things on my soul and my skin. But it’s too easy. It’s too easy because I know me. It’s too easy to find the next fascinating thing.
            There are the bells and the strings and the keys. There are the voices of angels to accompany them. There are the smiles and the hands held to the sky. There are all the ingredients to a wonderful concert. These are the things I’ve seen. Over and over and over.
            So time please stand still cause I want to relish the joy. I don’t want to do the thing I do all the time and become a cuckoo and slip outside the clock and shout out loud. I want to stay in this moment for just a little longer. For just a little while longer.
            I would like to stop thinking ahead and to stop looking behind. But I’m paid to do both in different ways. I have to. There’s no way I can’t. I make a living stirring my thick cauldron full of emotion and memories and feelings. I know every ingredient inside and I constantly pick and choose.
            They certainly are overflowing this summer.
            The fall will soon follow, however, and then the winter will be there.
            I’ve written blogs I haven’t posted. I’ve taken snapshots nobody else has seen. I’ve made promises only God has heard. To make myself remember.
            But the familiar hands of time tend to make you forget. Those daily doldrums. The buzzing stress. The strokes of pink everywhere. The flatness of this place. The fast forward nature of time and how it slips away from you, day after day after day.
            Will August meet September and find a new memory to make only to forget June and July?
            Will the scars on the soul only be replaced by new ones?
            Will the hope held in these hands slowly drip away and dry up like salt water?
            The night questions the joy just like shadows covering the light. I know the answers but man do I still find myself followed by a hundred familiar questions.
            This summer has been a backpack of answers. I’m still wearing it and I’m still climbing that mountain.
            I don’t plan on coming back down. 

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