Through a glass darkly

Funny how things change: with a light-switch suddenness, a cosmic flick of the wrist, you can go from active to passive, from yes to why in a continuum of seconds; no reason, no pause for thought. Funny how the world can sidestep. a jog and shift of minuscule proportions that leaves you standing in the slipstream of its passing, no longer carried along; and how, without warning, everything changes. That's not the way it should be, to be so abruptly ripped from the warm embrace of acquiescence and settled into a spot that is somewhere in the umbral regions of observing; you find yourself looking at previously comfortable images through an untwisted glass of unready, unforgiving emotion and finding them more than merely discomfiting. If you are to be changed, altered against your will by some ineffable force, it should be either a gentle shaping - something subtle and indefinable, unnoticed by the vessel taking form on the wheel - or a stomach-wrenching jolt of reconstruction that can be mistaken for nothing else; it should not pass and linger, subtle and yet so perfectly set that one can point to a moment in gone-by time and say without hesitation: There. There is where my passage was disembarked, through no will of my own. A strange thing, a little thing, a flick and flutter and you know that nothing has changed and nothing will change; you will continue on the way you have always gone. Your life will be as full of missteps and errors as it has always been, a clumsy bull's rush toward an ill-defined target, too caught up in your own momentum to stop even if you had desired it; and you will feel no slackening of the emotions that propel you as they have always done. And yet, somehow you have changed; you have let something pass you by, without regret or grief or even the desire to mourn its passing; you have looked beyond the smoked-glass mirrors in its wake and claimed the images you see as your own; you can say without hesitation or pause: it will not happen again.