I know Jack.

Once I had a picture book. My mother's. Now I've been reminded by a passing phrase and that book is open in me. There is a warm familiarity to the memory: the spirit of the book to the formation of my own. The order of cause, I forget. I invent it. I say "there, that book made me" because I like to know. Whether I loved the book because I recognized it as myself, or whether I became the book because I loved it, still, now I am in the pages.

I've been, while on my bike and riding, imagining or imaging the street where I ride. Myself from above so that I see what I have passed and what I am passing in a bending stream, or stretching my vision to include myself in four dimensions, stretched to all moments. The cars where they will be, the passersby where they once lived, their pasts on their backs.

An imposition of conscience. A good way to crash.

Navigating a painted world.

In conversations, sometimes, I am quiet. And though there is a staid saying said, of wise men knowing they are fools and shushing, I think my quiet is not born of wisdom, but bewilderment. A recognition that my thoughts are built on other people's thoughts, that my words will change to other words, that all words will be said, and if I speak, I might not hear them. I do not feel wise then, but like Lydia, Titus' Lydia, tongue cut. What name would I scratch in the sand with my stumps? Experience, curiosity, wisdom, uncertainty, fear? Waiting in the stream, for the water to pass.

The connection: time, and the building of the being on the been. The magic been-stalk, rising to the cloud. Above, the hungry giant and the gold. Below, the endless fall.