Flea Market Pictures

I wish I could know what they know. I wish I could find out everything they’d found out. I wish I could ask them about life. About what it means to be alive. I see their mouths in the picture and I wish I could make them move. All that knowledge, all that truth. And I can’t find my way to it. It’s gone, all that time they took to learn how to live, and it’s gone. I sometimes feel as if I’m stumbling around in the dark, and it will take a century to find a light. I wish I could ask them about it. What does it take to find a light? Maybe I’ll never find it at all. What if that’s it? What if this is it? They know, their eyes hold an entire universe. Each pupil is a star. I wonder what it was like when the star when into supernova. It must have been quiet to the rest of the world. The rest of the world went right on spinning, didn’t it know? I wonder what they asked themselves. Sometimes I look back on the people who lived before us and I wonder how they survived. All that pain, all that hardship. And then I think about the people who will live three hundred years from now, and I wonder what they’ll think. I bet they won’t know how we survived. Sometimes it drives me crazy, the fact that I’ll never know. The only way I know history existed is because people told me it did. And the only way I know the future will exist is because people tell me it will. And then I think about all of us, in our private little boxes. Trying desperately to cling onto the little speck of existence we’ve been given. And, oddly enough, I feel lucky.