A few thoughts put to paper five years ago

[verity_blues]

My first non-game related post on TWC, wish me well!
Sorry, if I am starting this thread in the wrong location. If so I am sure someone will be zapping it into its proper home!
Wrote this when I was stationed @Camp Lejeune, back in my military days, a month or so after 9/11.
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Strangers to Each Other

I lay awake and think of all the bright stars I have seen. I wonder just where all those remembered faces have gone. I look into the mirror to see once bright green oracles fading beneath the misery of just keeping them open. I wonder just where all the faces have gone, and if they feel quite as buried as I do.
Walking the streets of the city I pass so many different people. I am drawn to the ones with that telling spark in their eye, or that face speaking of a life lived. Like an open book I swear I could read their heart, and they can also say so of me. But we just pass each other by, not even seeming to acknowledge the moment until it is fading behind our backs. Walking so swiftly to the lives we dread living, so afraid we might be late getting to where we despise ever going.
Sometimes I wonder what could happen if, just once, I stepped in front of them and stared straight through to their soul. What if I unconsciously touched their face? What if they smiled, amidst all of the noise and bustling chaos of the morning surrounding us? What if we spoke honestly, yet without saying a word? What if we went without judging or knowing, as only strangers apparently can do?
I called the friends whose phone numbers I could still remember yesterday and when they answered I didn’t quite know what to say. I could hear in their voices that our shared times together were nothing less than precious. But were is of the past, as today we recalled what was, afraid to admit that what is isn’t us anymore.
Hanging up the phone was like waking in some repeating dream, except every time I dreamt it just one little thing changed. And now over time nothing remains the same as when I first started dreaming it, I am sure. Yet I still consider it repeating.
Am I not the same as I was yesterday? Or did this little thought or that little change leave a new me slightly different?
Change is the only thing we can really rely on, everything else fades away and dies; is eventually forgotten. Does it matter if it was cast aside or released lovingly? Does it matter that we have accepted all of this as the way it is? Or is this pain just our own souls saying no, it doesn’t have to be like this?
I’m so far removed from where I had started. I remember wondering just what I would do; now I wonder when I can stop doing. As if living day to day isn’t living anymore, more like dying over and over again to me.
I watched some foreign movie the other night that was undoubtedly old and likely seldom recalled except for this night that someone chose to run it. Though the verbal language differed, the feeling's that it captured were much akin to how I had felt.
I couldn’t help regretting that such a receptive story was so swiftly being forgotten, so powerful a telling being covered by time.
I sat pondering till morning light found me considering the paths I have taken and where they’ve really gotten me. Thinking that one day, not long from now, no one will remember me.
We can throw rocks and make ripples for all eternity; but, the rocks thrown sink as soon as they hit the water, forgotten and replaced by the next… and the next.
Am I already sinking? And if so what ripples did I leave? Or what distant shores did they brush upon?
The night is thunderous and the rain plummets franticly just outside this window. A million drops of water are falling from a sky that could no longer bear to hold them aloft. By tomorrow the puddles they form shall already be snatching away beneath the might of the sun.
I can’t help but smile as I remember all those people I have meet before. For I still wonder where they have gone, but I know it isn’t quite so far. And everything I see in something that somehow recalls of someone I have known before, in some oblique way is them.
Like a wave crossing the sea or a single raindrop falling to me from the sky, you still somehow reach me. Just a little different, just a little further along the way.

[Thanatos]

I like it. I just don't know what to think of it.