A hidden force twists up a vine and meets the base of an unfurling growth. This journey is forever perhaps - if you look for a very long time… but instantaneous if you were to simply come back later. We take our moments in a different cadence than the vine.
In another of my moments, bird feathers ruffle atop a branch that looks suspiciously like floating eyes peering in my window. The world sees me.
I cannot see the world unless I am looking beneath the leaves of a potted plant, through the angular webbing of spider silk, down onto the sunbaked and cracked so-called lawn that strips along the side of the street.
Nothing is notable about the street. It is worn the way you would expect from so many cars. Many things are run down here but the street is not one of them. And that is not notable. The street is only the transitory - it takes its moments in a different cadence than the houses.
Somewhere too far to see with eyes, but familiar to memory, a tree root breaches the sidewalk and makes for a treacherous jam for youth on wheels. However, it is manageable with caution or sheer force of speed.
There are many houses packed tightly, so tightly I wonder if it’s possible to remember so many bubbling roots as the trees feel alien here. To be clear this neighborhood only lives in a head now, as time has passed on and things have changed in the passing. And memory replays the houses sitting atop each other and framed so bizarrely with tiny little tufts of broken-glass speckled grass. All encroached upon by trees that seem to take their moments in such a different cadence than us that a man with a blueprint did not think to consider them growing.
That is now the problem of the youths and their wheels.
But it is not yet the problem of the perfectly fine street… though how many years will equate to how many inches roots will crawl could be something to trouble oneself over if one was so inclined.
I once buried a bracelet in this ground and did not find it again for 5 years. Now I think how silly it was that exploring the tuft in front of our little birdhouse felt like a full excavation. This place is small for being so large and my adult eyes ache when I see so many doors and windows cramped into one snapshot memory.
I used to live here and it was entirely normal. The world was the right size. But I was a child.
Now it feels the walls are closing in and choking out the sun. The night sky reflects all the lights in all the homes and allows us to forget where we are in the Milky Way.
I can forgive you for thinking this is all there is when it all still fits under a leaf poking through the angular webbing of spider silk stretched across a windowsill.
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