When It's All Too Late

A few days before my birthday, I emerged from an early morning dream of a memory.  It really was a memory, too, though not much of one - just waking up and getting dressed for school on a cool blue morning, a long time ago. How long? Tears For Fears on the radio long. 

Not much more to it than that, really, the morning and the song, and I woke into an atmosphere much like the one I'd just left. I shivered, though. The disjunct between then and now - or was it the lack of one? - left an eeriness that clung to me, as if I'd carried it over from the dream world. 

It was a curious feeling. I ran through my actual memory of that time (such as it is - who really remembers the details of such an ordinary moment?) Putting on my uniform and shiny penny loafers with dimes. The open window through which leaked the watery light. It all feels very alone, but then I always do.

Spring, 1984. Was there anything eerie about those days? No, I can't imagine so. They just were, in the way things are, and it's only in retrospect, or in the overlap of waking and dreaming do I have the sense of something vital that's been forgotten, some arcane gesture or fate now lost.

And yet, even now I can feel it there. The faint humming of time.