and there, on the back of my eye lids, is a large building, no longer in use. It is familiar but does not strike a cord like a home you had once lived in, but more like something you have known in the past but not intimately.
I know this place and yet do not and wonder why it is in my mind's eye. What role did it play in my past or in another past too distant for me to see? I am separate yet connected but cannot, for the life of me, know why.
I look longer, knowing that if I entered that weathered wooden door, I would know which way to turn after it closed behind me. Where does this knowledge come from, if not from memory?
I still stand outside, hesitant to enter, knowing that I will and have done so in my past or in a past life, with no knowledge now about which one is true.
The building is plain with weathered letters I can not read but the unreadable words hold a familiarity not normal to a dispassionate viewing. The colors are faded into the monotone wood that stands before me now and I still can tell you the colors as if it were freshly painted.
After a time, I step inside and again am overwhelmed with the sense of having been here. I stand in a large room with open rafters above me while remembering a time this room was full of sound and much more than is before me now.
I stand in the tall center and look up, up and know, oh, there was so much to see and it is on the edge of my vision. I can only taste a little of what it once was. I can't voice it but the knowing is still within me and I wonder why it is so strong in this building that I do not, and yet, do know.
Just as I stepped through the door of the building, I have stepped into a memory. I am awed by what I can almost see, can almost hear and know that the hearing and seeing are not imagination but memories...of some thing, some time I have forgotten.
There is clarity in my knowing but doubt as to the why of my knowledge.
I can no longer trust myself to know what is real, now or then, and so I step back through the door and open my eyes.
