We Share This Bench

We share this bench, you and I. We sit in comfort yet uneasy are we. Troubled with life, but pleased with it, too. Happy, indignant, content, and confused. Unaware, but informed. We are young, but we're old. Perfect products of the days in our years- slaves to our hearts and our minds and our peers. We are clad in our time, but in others as well- the times of our parents and times longer ago. Their mistakes we're to learn from, the lessons inferred. We're paying interest on the debts they incurred. We are stuck, yet we're moving so fast and so free and we're shackled with notions that no one can see. The two of us sit here so silent and still, screaming and running and grasping at air. We are looking for nothing, but we know it's all there. It must be, it should be, and we seek it alone, with eagerness, trepidation, fervor, and fear. What hovers between us on this bench where we sit are a million ideas, a thousand concerns, innumerable thoughts that swirl in our heads...all connected in space by a colorful thread woven through time by the things that we've said. Silly and lovely and burdened are we- foolish, enlightened, unable to see. Today is not ours, but it's all that we have. Tomorrow's unknown, but we know how it will be. The past we drag or toss far behind- set it up on a pedestal, lock it up in a box. This bench is merely a brief reprieve, we won't stay here long- we have reasons to leave. We will wake up tomorrow and we'll be the same, or perhaps we'll be different, but it will still be today. I know what will be here and wonder what won't. I will be me and you will be you but either or both of us may be stale or renewed. Even so, life will be pretty and ugly and good- and just and unfair and worldly and pure. Somewhere amidst it our ideas will be there and with them the worry that clouds up the air. I'll find within them that weaving of ours, that solid and vibrant, intangible thread. I'll hold to it fast and wherever it leads, I'll follow it back to the thoughts in your head.