Ribbon: A meditation

Ribbon

A meditation by Ivan Heitmann, 2020.

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And then there were three.

A life as lively as any other the which:

started with chernobyl and concludes with new life....

New life has a way of interrupting, hasn't it, especially when things are grey. Don't you love the fluffy grey chick on a rainy day in April? Yes. Yes you do. Somewhere a seed fractures a slab.

Sharp contrasts are irrefutable far away, but reality is an indescribable and unending gradient: a ribbon that registers that you are in fact there when you thought you were here, then here, not there. This grey is different from that grey, this green from that, pink from pink, white, white... and seemingly endless blues. You are never where you think nor whom you think and things are never what you think. You never remember things as they were then nor did your thoughts then make it in memory. 

--What does? Blink and they are all grown up, they say. Blink and you go grey, you see. But try to hold on to the ribbon and your hands will come away burnt grey. Hold on somewhere else then-- or don't.

Chernobyl? Yes, Chernobyl. My love story starts with Chernobyl, and a little girl in a safer place and then a little while later a littler girl(?) in a safer place still. The place is still/ but life never will be.

When your parents were young we played a game called Pandemic. 

I remember before the internet.

When we were young, fascism returned: the people wanted it because they were afraid. They were afraid because their otherwise monochrome lives were spent 

in aimless free time 
in a color-coded parallel
universe of depersonalization and echoes,
where the page never ends...
but they never got what they thought they saw.

We pause to survey: (noise-cancelling) headphones on, phone in greyscale mode--now squint. Without the sound and fury, what do you see?

Can you see the ribbon? The air is clearer now. Life entails life! you see. Two become three.