Goodbye to yesterday

At night, enough hours after the commotion has settled, the errands have been run, my food has digested, my plan for tomorrow has been cemented, I touch the ether.

With my mind alone I touch the smooth and warm fabric of my existence.  Muttering words to myself as if recording a surgery, the extraction of observations from my cerebral cortex.  Out there beneath the night sky I remember what was forgotten.

We already know what is true.

My eyes are closed as I write this.  You know what I am talking about even if I forget to cross a 't'. My eyes are closed because I am not making an observation, I am receiving a sensation.

I am in love with tomorrow.  Actually, no, let me be more mature.  I am in love with yesterday.

Yesterday is the only thing that I know how to obsess over.  It's the only thing I feel I cannot have, now that I have made the transition from feeling young to feeling old.  But tomorrow is starting to look tempting.

When I was young, I was passionately in love with tomorrow.  When I got older, taller, faster, fitter, more intelligent, more successful and wise, I was going to find the greatest love.  And I was going to be the greatest lover.  But I wasn't any of those things yet.  Each yesterday left behind was good riddance; another leaped-over hurdle I was happy to have never really touched, for it would have slowed my progress had I actually endured the stumbles.

But now tomorrow is right in front of me. It's the closest day to today so all I can do is lament on the furthest day away - yesterday.  Yesterday is gone.  It's gone, they're gone, we are no more, I don't remember most of what happened or why it was important.   But I'm in love with it.  I think about it in different colours and different shades, what it would have looked like in the sunlight and what I remember it to look like under the moon.  Each day I try to recapture it, because yesterday is where I left my treasures.  Yesterday is where I left my books, my poems, my drive, my passion, my discipline, my focus.  And each day I open the box of yesterdays and poke underneath the clutter with my mind because I'm certain I left my map in there; absolutely certain in one of those yesterdays I jotted down where I was going.

But each book is now blank, each poem has been swallowed by lovers past, each passion extinguished by circumstance, each discipline interrupted by worry, leaving my drive and focus moot.  The past is dead.  Each yesterday is either a dark empty void or blinding hellfire.  

And that's why it's been so hard to write as of late.  I keep trying to impress yesterday.  I keep trying to impress yesterday upon myself.  I get confused combing through the dark box of yesterdays, eyes wide open, as my fingers comb through those mysterious coarse pages, trying to make observations instead of receiving sensations, I confuse those coarse sheets with the soft ether.

For tomorrow, there is little truth in yesterday.

So tonight I close my eyes to receive the truth, and tomorrow any truth from yesterday will appear to me on its own; I will not despair for the lies that remain hiding forever in my past.  I will not search in the shadows for truth, not even in those I have cast.