Before you ...

Eating a mango if you close your eyes and really focus on the taste, you're literally taken back to a different era. The taste, a kind of "pungent" sweetness that departs from the flesh of the fruit and dissolves in your mouth, the transitoryness of the experience--for a few seconds, you're not here. A ripe mango dying in your mouth is a time-travel device.

Knowledge is dangerous. You can die of suffocation and sensory overwhelm if your awareness expands without you being ready to accommodate the expansion. Sometimes you crave to know it all, to experience it fully, to dig deep, to receive everything--but existence doesn't want you to die a miserable death, so it deprives you of it all, smiling at your curses while waiting for you to bloody evolve.

You behave like an idiot, and realize it 20 seconds later. A period of regret follows, along with a resolution to fix yourself and not repeat your idiotic behavior. Until the situation arrives again, and before you realize, you're the same old idiot.

I met a few of them, maybe after what, 2 years? A brief period of warmth. Then distance. They're in their own world, and I have no clue about them. I'm in my own world and they have no clue about me. We walk back to our lives. It's pretty much possible that I may never meet them again. In the middle of the interaction, I suddenly realize that this could be the very last time they see me or I see them, and it overwhelms me with a strange gratitude. Towards whom, I don't know.

Flowers--red, violet, yellow, light pink, turquoise blue. Neatly tied into a beautiful bundle. They were alive and singing in someone's hands. Then the bride received the bouquet. And handed it to someone standing behind her, while she got ready to receive the next bouquet, the next gift. This bunch of beautiful, tender flowers--they got dumped amidst the other bouquets in the corner. Their song had ended. I picked them up, and caressed them, unwilling to let them go away so fast. They smiled as if to say, "It's okay, we're not sad...in fact, we're joyous for the brief period of life we came to enjoy." They had already started to fade.

I wanted them to be alive and smiling. Forever.