When Memory Feels More Alive Than the Present
There are moments when joy no longer happens, but must be remembered. One still knows that there was laughter. That touch felt easy. That visits with family, friends, people, were meaningful and beautiful. One knows it, but one does not feel it.
Something has shifted. Not radically, not dramatically. But quietly. Like a pane of glass between oneself and what once was. One still goes. One still speaks. One does what one always did. But what comes back is muffled. As if someone removed the sound from the music. When joy exists only as a thought, no longer as a feeling. Does it become a lie then, or is it the echo of something real?
It is hard to talk about. Because everything is still there: the smile, the encounter, the gesture. Only the inside no longer reacts as it once did. As if something has hardened. Not visible, but perceptible. And sometimes one wonders what went wrong. Whether something was missed, whether one drifted too far from what brings life. Because the warmth is there, in theory. But one is cold.
But perhaps it is not a failure, but a phase. A time of friction between closeness and numbness. A time in which love is not absent, only the access to it. And perhaps it is this very tension that says the most about us: that we long for feeling, even when it doesn’t come.
