An ordinary day. A slight breeze. A sun blinding and bright. A couple clad in white posing for wedding pictures in the park across from my apartment. A handful of couples, actually, all of them smiling in the sunlight. Motos driving by. The homeless lady I often seen waiting patiently outside of the cafe, hoping for money. A few tourists, lazily strolling. The owner of the Internet cafe, wearing a white dress shirt, despite the heat, looking professional as he types away at his keyboard.
I see and feel all of this.
There will come a time and a place ten, fifteen years from now where everything I'm writing will be but a memory, or the memory of a memory, or worse, a forgotten portion of time, swallowed up by the days, weeks, months and years that follow it. This moment won't last, I tell myself, so it is best to remember it, to chronicle it, not for future reference but for reference now. If I don't remember it now, this day will be lost. Or maybe I will lose it anyways, despite my best efforts.
Think about all the days we lose! (Or are they all stolen from us? By whom?) The big ones we remember, yes, but it's those small ones, the ones that contain the actual living that somehow become submerged in our march towards whatever it is we think we are striving for. These are the days that are buried, these slow days, these lazy days, the ones where nothing much seems to happen.
I would like to find them, if I could, those days of yesterday. All those lost days from my thirteenth year, and my eighteenth, and my twenty-fourth. (Or even those from last week.) I would like to hunt them down and keep them captive, relive their boredom, wallow in their ordinariness. Just for a moment. That's all I ask. To revel in their simplicity and complexity. To see those blue skies and snowy days and try to see if I can feel them now as I felt them then, know them now in a way I couldn't before. See if the hindsight that aging provides has a real, palpable purpose.
I think this day, this moment, will be forgotten. If I'm lucky, ten, fifteen years from now, it will reappear in a flash, a spark in my mind. Then it will be gone. I want to keep it, horde it, allow it to linger. Why do they all have to dissolve, these days?
To make room for the next day, I suppose.
An ordinary day. A slight breeze. A sun blinding and bright.
