She gets sad sometimes. She knows not why.
Life is, after all, rather pleasant. The summer sun feels nice. There’s little wind. Her belly is full.
Still, her mind keeps turning to the past and to the future. She cannot focus on the now, where things are good. She remembers the before, and thinks of friends now gone. She thinks of the to be, and of her friends of today that will no longer be there, in the then.
A loner by nature, she nonetheless longs for company. Yet when company is found, wishes for solitude. Never satisfied. Never unthinking. Never at peace.
Perhaps, she ponders, emotions are a form of weather — some days being intrinsically sad in the same way that some days are inexplicably joyous. Maybe patterns of feelings swirl the globe, and some are just sensitive to the ebbs and flows. Could such a thing be measured, she wonders, with forecasts made and warnings released. Is that why some storms are called tropical depressions? Is this why pressure is described as high and low?
She thinks of the days when storms have swept through her life, life becoming a cataclysmic torrent of thunder, lightning, and rain interspersed with calm and sun; biting wind becoming gentle breeze in minutes, yet with the promise of turning once again, without warning. She wonders if anyone else feels like a maple seed, buffeted storm to storm, hoping to eventually land somewhere safe, to rest, to grow, and to, over time, become something else, something stronger.
She feels that no one does, but as she thinks, she remembers two others. Yes, there have been some. Some that knew. That she could talk to, that understood when some things just were and no amount of effort could change what was into something that was not to be. She remembers discussions, stretching deep into the night. Finding comprehension in others. Finding a strange sort of joy in discussing pain. But alas, they are gone now, lost to the past, naught by memory.
So she sits, alone, accompanied by none but a dandelion, ephemeral as all things, and thinks of things that were not and will never be.
Blind to the now.