Reduced to Thought

Looking at my hands, my vision blurs to glance upon them in another year, another place, another context. There were quickened heartbeats in that small girl's chest, but her hands that held the phone were still. Motionless. Strong, maybe. They knew the art of restraint.

You were only just a few numbers away, but there might as well have been oceans between us. You were more than accessible, yet still I would not step into your world. Somehow your nearness, in the strangest way, only made me keep my distance. Perhaps there was intuition buried underneath my reason...back then when I belonged to a paradigm of rules. They told me your beauty would only rob me of mine. It knew that somewhere I had been taken captive, not set free. I only held the phone. Clinging to my rules. Loving how they shaped me.

Then all at once--a shift in person. After all these things make life interesting, right? So I Dialed, you answered. Creating the downfall, the spiral; a new life of different reasons and different choices. They altered my paradigm. I guess we make them and in return they make us.

Well I was made different. When I lost my natural template, I lost my identity. For that was all I was. Passion, security, and fundamentals obliterated, I am no longer a noun, but verbs in transition. Searching, weighing, feeling...and passing the time.

Like fire sweeping through a forest, all has been erased. What changes with the wind--it cannot define my being. All is indifferent and bleak, besides the harsh light of truth. Sometime when the fog has cleared I'll see the world by that sun. There something lies unchangeable, worth adhering to, loving, and chasing after. I do not find it in myself. I have been reduced to thought.