'Sometimes'

It was an unearthly dark, and in it you drove.

You swerved left and noticed the sparkling debris on the road, cravenly passing it as if you were walking too close to its jagged beauty. In a few breathes: minute and tense, and the scene was put behind you. Yet in that discovery - a shard remained in your mind and to your home it followed.

The shard was this: the witnessing of accidents, even their aftermaths - they pierce you to where you belong: a place safe; a place sound; a Somewhere most often furthest from where we are, when we are living.

But in these abstract polaroids that you house in your mind, regardless of importance or intensity: a few lost hours and they are a few hundred miles away. You're back to being nonchalant; to being blithely brilliant.

And true enough, once they sweep up the glass or when it gets scattered enough by the frequency of traffic or perhaps winds - leaving nothing visible or significant enough for a sign or warning - it'll come back, back like an exact page of a strangely and bitterly familiar tragedy which you've read from before; a misprint which you could have avoided making: but repeated as you forgot the first.

( _")