smell the flowers.

You have to wonder sometimes where this is all going someday, even if wondering seems like staring into something endless and black. I happen across the traces of some lives that I have lived with, and loved; them having been a part of my memory and history without ever insinuating their presences, the wind just blowing them in, and having stayed there -- with me -- as if they have always belonged there.

(They were just like flowers in my field; one moment nothing was there then there they were, putting out roots and after some time they were in bloom and the field just wouldn’t look the same without them now.)

They are mostly in the music I play or listen to, photographs that have mostly faded from my mind that pop up somewhere, a postcard, certain turn of phrases, some old films on a rerun, mid afternoons, the stars or when the rain falls and the lulls in between them. They are just there, even if I'm not looking.

And these vestiges of times glorious and golden, after the initial ache of missing those souls pass, will sometimes lead me to some subdued thoughts of where exactly are we leading ourselves into, if there even is an end to all those roads that we have traveled on and forks that we still have to take, if ever there will be a chance to smell those flowers again, or perhaps we have just always been the captive audience of our collective imagination.

It is good that these thoughts are not the lingering kind; only exercises for the mind not a monster that I should battle with because the flowers that are still there are at most only short-lived and I should always find the time to stop and smell them.