transience of fragile lives

It is imminent and I’ve been considering a redesign, but every time I sit down to tackle it I decide against it. I’ll do something eventually, but not until I troubleshoot some functionality problems to do with some unique navigation ideas that I have. As you may have seen, I’ve also been messing with my msn messenger. To be honest, I’m still not all that happy with it, I prefer other means of communication, but it’ll do for now.

Enough to make me inhale, catch my breath, blink rapidly while the world kaleidoscopes, then settles into precise, intimate focus once again. The clarity of this new sight is horrific, every detail searing your retinas - the frayed edge of the carpet, the brown stains on the peeling wallpaper, the slight murmur of voices in the elevator humming and creaking gently past. Something inside me scrabbles frantically for meaning, even I have those few moments of adrenalin when it is shot through my body and I shake uncontrollably.

On a golden pleateau of unimportant things I feed the squirrels. During the bus ride I averted a gun shot wound to the head that I awoke to the other morning. This morning I had tears. I'm not sure who they were for. For those who had lost and those who had been lost. For an existence which had meaning only for me, as I was subsumed with the problems of me, the trifles of me. Now this self-absorption was nothing, shrunk into perspective by the new hole ripped inside, aching to take away the pain of someone loved.
If I'm melancholy, it's because of this new realization slicing through the general blur and slur of a sloppy existence, living from day to day. It slows so that you're able to discern the edges with startling sharpness. Sometimes you forget because even as you partake in the grief it's not really yours. And other times you sit and it settles around you like a cape, yet it offers no warmth, only the chill of isolation, that sad, lonely and dignified word which conceals the depth of the jagged, consuming wound inside - bereavement. When I walked down the halls of the malls it suddenly hit me she wasn't alone, I wasn't alone, privileged with this awful knowledge, this life truth. It was everywhere, etched onto the faces of those with sad, quiet eyes and a storm of grief inside. I'd just never noticed it before.

It's peculiar how something so entirely natural, the only certainty we know about our existence - that it will end - still disturbing, so sensational when it asserts its truth. It shuts the door, turns the key, locking it tight. We know that it will happen, but we are so young, unprepared for the transience of our fragile lives. I watched someone die, year by year. I shrank as if it was catching, this disease of death. The unexpected allows us no such luxury. It takes without excuse or explanation.