Jar of wishes

You lie hidden somewhere within my jar of wishes, buried in the layers where the old dreams lie, in the detritus of fading, failing things: between the faltering shine of foreign coins, of silent stained marbles and broken immobile toys, within a collage of dated stamps, old movie tickets and dented badges. I have built buildings and planes upon this foundation of lost limbs and other half-constructed things, and in the crowded troposphere of my jar, cities breathe and blink. But you are the pattern of my dreams, the twinkle of the constellations that continue to glimmer and glow, though the lights in the cities may be slowly fading, the marbles losing their lustre and the coins their gleam — even as those dreams go out one by one, like fireflies in a jar.

Recriminations

This has been one of those weeks that leave you in a sort of bewildered stupor, uncertain and unsettled in a way that makes it thoroughly impossible to see how the bits of your life ever once fit together in a pattern that used to make some sort of sense. Sometimes it's difficult not to become inhabited by the echoes of the past, to extract yourself from those memories which are in themselves utterly inextricable from the reverberations of regret, from the silence of unasked questions and unbegotten answers. Patience isn't always a virtue; it's possible to have waited too diligently and too persistently, for a season of ripeness that has in fact slipped past already, past the time of blooming and withering, and those missed opportunities lie festering and rotting on the ground with all the putrefying condemnation of regret.