returned mail

The frenzy passes, leaving a silvery trail, like longing, in which are glints of lapis. The scent of blue hyacinths. Mail continues to come back, read or unread, I can't remember. I could work it out but why? They are like fragments of some old conversation, drifting out towards the stars, forever whispered and forever unheard ... unless some unimaginably delicate sensor in the Andromeda Nebula picks up the transmission: You are so perceptive ... it hears and then cancels the thought. Wrong. And after all it isn't as if I haven't been here before. Examine the dark interior for signs of shame. Minimal. Regret? Yes, but isn't that a constant? A sweet sadness that isn't always there, for what might have been, for what shimmered delusively into view for an hour or a day then fell into starry dust. Recall a friend telling me how, as soon as she leaves work, the characters in her head begin again their long extrapolation of the possibilities. One of them will be herself. Or a version thereof. Others will be unreal, or thus far unreal. Still others will be ... real but not as they are in the world. I am myself perhaps sometimes among them; though not as I am. Nothing is ever lost but much passes away unheard, unseen. Unthought? The un thoughts gather at the margins of sense, a great hissing cloud like the dead. The unborn. What might have been. What could yet be. What was. Is.