It’s been happening so long that I don’t know when it started. I might start in one chapter, then remember a preceding chapter or a later one. There is a thread of commonality, a series of  knots tied together sewing together a life – earlier, rough and uneven, the frankensteinesque. Later it becomes smoother, and more types of weaves hold it together, but what they hold together is common.

It never presents itself as new, even when new is what I seek – a way out of a cave I find myself in, perpetually climbing through one to another, an aqueous Sisyphus, swimming… always swimming away a place I no longer belong, always to another place -the coarser knits where I was looking to belong, the finer and more even stitches were I simply moved to get away from not belonging. Always leaving behind things once held dear – why else would I have them? – always making myself lighter, more agile. Always moving, always growing, like the lobster that keeps growing a new shell. As conscious of things as ever, yet never quite knowing when something begins or ends. Thinking it does doesn’t mean it does, thinking it doesn’t doesn’t mean it doesn’t.

It all flows, landmarks shift in the ocean. Nothing is constant. There is never a way to go back; there is never the same place to go back to. A lifetime of sandcastles on beaches lost in time. Retrospect evolves.

There was a point to all of this when it began – when did it begin? – and there were thoughts, emotions, passions. Lost, gone, empty shells outgrown; ambitions achieved, dreams attained, dreams forgotten, lives touched, lives lost, lives gained. The faces of enemies shift into those of friends without morphing. Cages change from those rusty to those clean, to the gilded, to removed every time only to reveal a different cage.

At any point it makes sense, and yet together it makes none. And when together it makes sense, that point in time makes no sense. The future that shouted now whispers conspiratorially, the past that was not there is now there.

It is good to be lost.