Layers

This morning, as I stepped out into the cold, I saw them.

The layers.

I stopped and stared. The vision was intense, almost tangible. It visits me on and off, with varying intensity, but today was one of the more intense days. Today, the layers rose around me like phantom mountains, and plummeted beneath me in phantom valleys; so vivid, I could swear they were almost visible.

Layers of time and space. I live in a constant subconscious awareness of them. When I look at a scene, I can almost see what it looked like long ago, what it will look like tomorrow, and the images seem to stand around me like ghosts as I walk hastily through their midst, marveling, slightly frightened. Imagine if a double-exposed photograph became three dimensional and you could walk around in it. That's the basic feeling. It's a weird experience, and I'm not sure why it happens to me so often, but I have to say, I'm glad it does.

All too often, we as people tend to be incredibly short-sighted. We only see things as they are now, at this very moment, and we tend to assume that this is the default setting, this present arrangement of dimensions around us. We assume our surroundings are here to serve us, to provide a backdrop, a stage for the very important drama of our daily lives. While this is clearly true, we would do well to remember that everyone who has ever lived has felt the same way, and now they are gone. No one remembers them.

No one remembers the old buildings, the old parts of town that were razed in the 1980s, plastered over with blacktop and covered by new buildings. We forget. We forget so quickly, it alarms me. Because I know I'm next. Soon it will be me in the graveyard, a name on a stone that no one can pronounce, and the town I grew up in will be gone.

Maybe someone will see it. Maybe some day another person will step out into the cold and see my world, drifting around them in veil-like layers. They will wonder if it ever existed. They will walk a bit faster.