Moonless nights haunt me. They evoke remembrances of a carefree life when I dreamed without doubt to what my future could be. I yearn for a time when my mother’s tree swayed beneath the dusk like an amber sea, but the past is locked without a key. Never to return—only flee

Moonless nights haunt me. They evoke my once carefree life when I dreamed without doubt to what my future could be. I yearn for a time when my mother’s tree swayed beneath the dusk like an amber sea, but the past is locked without a key. Never to return—only flee.

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up- as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You would assume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousand things to learn.

Human beings intuitively divide time into the past, the present, and the future. We perceive the past as immutable and fixed, the present as reflecting actuality, and the future as undefined and nebulous. As time passes, the moment that was once was part of the present becomes part of the past; and a moment of the heretofore previously unrealized future arrives and becomes the new present. The past is a record, the present is real, and the future is an imaginary thought.

But memories were fragile and not to be trusted. They were a weight that Faolin did not need to carry with him when he set out that morning. Things of the past, like the fragile boy he had been, had no place on a man’s journey towards his future.

A violinist fiddled.
With strings resined for winter.
Summer's light splintered.