LIFE AS OUTER SPACE

Walking through the slow winter rain down the big city street to work he was nearing the office when he caught on the moist gray air the merest waft of a fragrance that was - gone - then there it was again and gone again, a wisp of a - there was a memory there; it was-- it was a scented fragment of life from far ago; brief as ecstasy it had another time about it, but in the same life-- time can be like that, you can often be here and have been there at the same moment, which can be disconcerting if you spend a lot of time in time, I mean in time, the whole time, not just about time or on time, especially when walking through winter rains later in life on the way to work if you've been a traveler...

You can learn much about time from fragrances, there is a measure there in the mind that knows such things and always has, lays out the incremented timeline beside the incident and says Wow that was a long time ago, it has something to do with... sweet... romance he thinks, some romantic moment in the distant past, when he was newly a young man, about then, that far ago--

The fragrance is and isn't, like a light bulb on the fritz - suppose that happens more and more as you get older, the thought slips in - he can’t catch and hold it, that magic and uplifting fragrance that takes him back to a self he’s lived in before, like those romantic moments themselves, whenever and wherever they were, impact like a freight train made of air, like any romantic moment in fact, was it a moment on a park bench or just walking along a street somewhere somewhen...

He’s no longer where his body is now, but is strolling in the past along this big city street toward the intersection just before the office, wandering among the kinds of memories that come flashing back into life on wings of the air like this, suddenly there they are, those powerful connections that no longer really connect, just reach back into who you once were, like starlight into outer space...