It is winter now. I feel quiet and vivid. The talk I hear seems to be the talk of long ago. Peace. Struggle. And everybody waiting. Is it all only another illusion, a dream from which we never wake? It has been years since those days. There is still something burned out in me from those days. Yes, I have adapted myself, ten-till-eight, the office desk and years have passed.
Here the trees are withering with winter again. The cars roll smoothly along the streets, and in the winter twilight the air, light and soft, is like an old benediction of a time long ago, and the twilight seems to hold a secret we will never know.
On an evening like this, I am often alone with my thoughts. The birds are back in the nests, feeding the little ones. The bats on the hunt. And the memories in those thoughts turn to another time.
The corner street light blooms against the soft winter darkness. I see a picture, an Indian evening. I am walking along a road, through a driveway, visible lamp posts passing by. Yet the streets are quiet, empty. The buildings emerge in the twilight and I remember again what it was like when I was young and inexperienced.
The picture seems surreal, almost upon me. It fades into the light of the street lamp. Along our street stands a line of old elms and now they seem to draw me toward them. They are the trees now it seems in the fields beyond the road and my sense skips by as I see them moving now in the evening breeze.
When I think like this, alone, a great calmness comes over me. The trees loom like silent apparitions, somehow speaking to me in the wind of time, until a stillness within the night seems to hold suddenly an old and unattainable happiness.
But in the darkness, as the dark leaves turn against the street light, a strange melancholy makes the night almost unbearable for an instant. A powerful remembrance moves inside, but if I move it will be lost, a mysterious reflection, drawing me back in time, but it is all a dream, an old want, a conundrum and I know it.
Even if the dream were to become a reality again, it is too late, because I myself know the influences of the times gone by will never arise again.
As I turn out the porch light. I suddenly feel like an old traveler burdened with the necessities of life. Searching for the missing chapters of life. That is all, the crudities, the superficiality. Yes and yet, I shall not forget the privilege(s) of the time gone by in the long, stream of eternity.
-boringbug
The Boringbug 
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