There are moments as you are moving in an itinerant way, walking the dog, riding your bike down Olive Street, cleaning last night’s dishes, when you glimpse fleetingly the sketch of your life.

                This is a more remarkable thing than it sounds because it lacks any sense of try.  Normally you are there living, shading the space between two penciled lines, defing the curves of the planned and the angles of the adventitious.  Those leaded ruts become just a touch darker and deeper day by day with your friends, your showers, your breakfast.  But you are not trying, just as you don’t try to blink or breath or moan in your sleep.  Daytime finds you aboriginal and pristine in your notions of need: eat, drink, work, love, tire, cry.  By night, your body is abandoned for the streets of an echo world, but still, your mind is inventing, not looking inward.

Until you are doing this thing that would fit just as naturally into anyone else’s sketch, aesthetically humdrum, and the dials are turned.  The focus is adjusted.  The nearsight becomes far and suddenly you are looking at the whole slide.

It’s not so false in that out of body way that people talk about when they think they are going to die.  There is neither the broad immediacy of panic nor the splitting self-awareness of a depressive state.  You are not watching yourself episodically, your mind trying to imagine how you look moving instead of how you feel.  Rather, your awareness has been laundered, turned inside out.  Your synapses are firing all in reverse.

You see that you are in love.  A breath in offers a minute pause from all the bodily pinches and sighs of such delightful agitation and you peek through the slats of the privacy fence guarding your future with him.  Are you having children together?  Is he reading the news on a couch you both bought?  Will you make his eggs the way he likes them?  Do you know how he likes his eggs?  You have a look at his knees and you’re seeing them bend the same way in five years.   They are making you bend the same way in five years.

You breath out and worry that this is the kind of lost and found love that ventures to define your life.

You are a seer in so many other directions.  You see that you are doing lots of things that you don’t like, sleeping in until ten on your days off when you’re not even that tired.  Hours in front of effete television that boasts of lives no one could possibly really live, but it’s all so filmy and soft-filtered that you can’t help but want it.  You are seeing this and wondering, does a person grow out of lazy?  Should a person grow out of lazy?  You are so uncomfortable with the question but already reminding yourself that the next episode airs on Monday.

And you smile because you are also doing things that you do like.  Things that you didn’t study in college, things that pay no money until you’ve been doing them for at least fifteen years.  How peculiar, the great probability that you will be alive in fifteen years!  They are so good that you will wait, you will plant your perennials.  You’ve already been alive for fifteen years, for more.  You are delirious with the future.

You have looked at your mother and father sometimes, inhuman-seeming and collected in their remodeled house with all of their taxes filed in February.  The mistakes they learned this adultness from are fables.  But for a moment now, you’re looking at them and thinking: “here I go?  Here I go.”  You are peeking into who you might be when all this now is its own yarn, just a whispered past.

And then it’s gone.  You dry the dish, park the bike.  You pick up the dog’s shit like you always do.