The present, my woe

I try no, I’m sure I do. Or maybe… With the whole weight of my being, I try to enjoy the present. I stretch each minute wide enough to step inside, to sit a while not merely pass through. This existence with intention, this awareness I otherwise tuck away, as if noticing the fine grains of now could slow their fall, could hold off the blur of becoming memory. Some mornings, the light lands just right, casting water like shadows over old wood at the edge of the table. And I tell myself, This is it. This is what it means to be alive. Even as the thought folds into the next, and the next. I fall back into another dream. They say if you dream at dusk, it comes true but what of those for whom I grind my sweat and bones. The alarm rings. I slither from bed into a dress they call civil, when I could be wearing colour, prints, feathers, joy. I chug tea, the drink I despise the most, because it forces the present into clarity, waking me against my will. I walk slower now. Not from weariness, but hope that dragging my feet through time might leave deeper footprints, might anchor me to something more enduring than memory, more honest than photographs. A child with a balloon: a bright red spot in the dew dim dawn, it slips from her fingers, and with it, her spark. Still, no matter how I linger, how I pause, how I hold my breath and try to feel it all, the scent of this morning’s tea on my fingers, the hum of distant traffic, the sudden ache of a name I haven’t said in weeks, the moment slips away. Indifferent. Dissolving into the forward pull of time. Because the present does not wait for poetry. It does not care for attention. It flares and fades, flickers and dies, and I’m left chasing its smoke with open hands. And tomorrow unapologetic, unbending, rises like a tide I cannot reason with. It looms behind every joy, every pause, every fragile instant I try to claim as mine. It does not ask if I’m ready. It does not soften. It arrives regardless often, as dreams vanish in its wake.