crowd

Sometimes a life can change in a moment. You are swept up by a crowd, barely noticing where you are going, and what the collective is doing and spend decades after researching crowd mentality, poring over what makes people do things they never would do if they were alone. You see a woman dance one day, and realize you must do everything in your power to spend the rest of your life with her, and she turns to walk out of the room, but you must run after her, and tell her. You fall asleep in the train, exhausted from a long journey, and your dreams are visited by a character, and another character, and a story begins to form, and you awake in a start, and you write everything down on any surface available, feverishly, and one day the book is read by people the world over. One day, an animal dies before its time, and you think of things differently. You read a book that makes you become vegetarian, and you don’t eat meat for the next ten years. You wake up one day and know what it is you must do with your life. You wake up with a certainty where there was only doubt the day before. The first time you see a snowflake. The last time you saw him walk away, and he didn’t turn around. The first time you hear the first strings of guitar on the first song of this album that will become the soundtrack of your college years. You knew you were going to marry him when you saw a photograph he took of his parents. The first time you meet someone. The last cigarette you smoked. These are moments you can write poems about. Today was not one of those moments, but maybe today is a day I will remember forever because of it. Some of my most persistent memories are unspecific and unextraordinary.