Aquarium

The glass wall between me and them, or maybe everything - is thin, barely perceptible, but insurmountable as a flow of time. I sit in a snug -in waiting chair, which dermantine cracked like hardened land, and I observe their silent, filled with water life. Slow, choreographic dance without sound, only bubbles rise up like a failed prayer. The collar of the shirt, overnight, seems to shrink through a centimeter, tightening the neck - a tiny, stubborn reminder of the boundaries of my own body.

One, the largest, with a torn tail fin, freezes in the middle of the road, as if it had been remembered a long -forgotten, pleasant event. Her scales are the paradic armor polished like a mirror, and for a moment, something else goes on. A long, lost summer sun. It took so little - cloudy water and one fish with a torn fin to come back where I swore, I would not come back. At that moment, on the old wooden bridge, where she laughed, and her laughter was in the air like this fragrant fresh water.

The aquarium expands. It becomes that lake, its cloudy bottom - muddy with our bathing shore. Smaller fish, wearing their shadows like worn coats, turn into a blurry silhouette of that evening - a wake of someone's hand, someone's lost scarf. Everything there, in that glass cube, moves according to the rhythm of those times. Slowly. The most important things happen slowly. And the artificial, pale moonlight that fires through the lid is the same one that then fell on her wet hair.

I look at the big fish, its scarred fin. The scar. So something was. Something sharp, real. She moves slowly again, continuing her silent ceremony, as if nothing had happened, as if a recollection was just a short stop inspired. Oh, I'm staying here.

Is memory is just such an aquarium? The enclosed space where the moments of once in a circle are in a circle, gradually fading, until only their shadows remain, until the real, what was real and what is just a play of light on old, mirror armor?