I thought her birthday was yesterday and then I remembered I was a day early.

Yes.  I am in a pensive mood, a state of sadness.  It can happen sometimes. 

I'm sitting on the cold floor just inside my doorway.  It's a shadowed area away from the one light I turned on automatically as I entered my house.  My house.  My own space.  And yet today it seems so undeserved, so foreign.

In a year I feel so much has changed.  My memory, for one, fails me more often than it used too.  It's due to my stress levels I think, unconscious ones.  The lack of decent sleep joined with the worries for the future: a future that is so wide and expansive that I am excited by its energy but scared of how it has every potential to cave in on itself.

It's like when a mosquito is dancing around you, attempting to attack.  With its smallness it can make you scratch for hours, days even.  It literally feeds off of us, taking our blood, and yet with our hands it can be squished. 

Squish.  A word that mud is made of, like squelch.  Onomatopoeic.  Says how it sounds. 

Loss.

Let the 's' linger and it fades away to nothing.  A hint of what was but the start of what will be.  Adventures to be grabbed in an instant.  Laughter to be shared over and over and over as the memories that do resist the ticking clock move the moments onwards.

Why do I keep the clock ticking by my door when it doesn't tell the time?