I imagine all the places I once lived, books and friends and loved ones left behind, the ruined tapes and the music stacked up for safekeeping. Tunes warped, words garbled with the passing of time.

I walk in the fog, past the orange trees and brambles keeping my heart free but I remember less and less each year. I walk lightly and grow older by ten minutes.

A woman/girl once wrote to me and had to use Google translator to understand what I meant. She delighted in finding all these foreign words for time, for the passing of time. I dreamt of her that was dreaming of me, even though there were no words for it.

I walked across the field, the sleepy-eyed yellow roses nodding in their internal drowsiness, the dense fog coagulating into drops of water on thick leaves. I saw myself from a distance, as if walking to get the old sun off my back, out off my eyes. I am alive, even if from afar. If I could speak with God I would say, it's time to speak in plain English, my friend.

I walk without any appointments but can't return to anything. Individual crows follow me unknowingly. All the roads that find their way are knotted or weaved into one single memory, as tangible as the book I hold in my left hand, as real as the lined, empty pages it contains.

(words, borrowed from Darwish).