Discovering Lost Footprints (#702)

The relentless fluctuations of space and time find me in yet another coffee shop on yet another beautiful Dallas morning. Yesterday I had the rather unanticipated opportunity to go and visit my old apartment complex, in which I spent five formative years of my life. Just across from my domestic epicenter: my first school, Rosemeade elementary. Just across from the home of the Rosemeade Eagles: my first church, Rosemeade Baptist. You get the idea. Within the two mile radius from apartment #702 lay the thousands, perhaps millions of footprints I placed into the earth. And I won’t even speculate as to how many miles I logged on my one-speed cruiser. (You can see all the photos by by clicking here.)


Watergate Apartments, Carrolton TX

Retracing those disjointed steps, I was blindsided by a most uncanny series of memories. With startling vividness, I was able to recall the moment I saw my first fight… the creek in which we spent countless summer days in search of the fabled King Crawdad… the stone steps leading up to our apartment which I “accidentally” rolled a watermelon down.. the exact spot my Mom was pulled over after, I swear, racing a cop (she thought it was my Dad-the 1981 Impala shares an unusual resemblance to a police cruiser).


Grade school revisited... I'm much... taller.

Walking those steps, uncovering moments long ago buried beneath the wreckage of my consciousness, I could not shake the feeling that time is nothing but entirely illusory. Flooded with a visceral repulsion to our socio-cultural paradigm of inescapable linear time, I came to the conclusion that there is but one instant. The numerary constructs created by man are no more real than the hands of a clock oscillating between noon and midnight.

Of course, linear based time does serve a valid and comforting purpose: it transforms the random and chaotic nature of life into a more concrete and accessible progression. If the days and years of our lives are stones placed in progression, time is certainly a flowing stream that smoothes them, their ultimate dissolution inescapable.

Indeed, stones which we spend so much time erecting are fated to whither, surrounded on all sides by the gentle waters of eternity.

A moment inside me quakes, and I’m left shuttering for days
Left trying to begin, only to find not only I’ve begun,
But ended as well
-Myself