Gratitude Journal Part 2 by Ken Tomaro

Image | Isaac Taylor

Gratitude Journal Part 2

Floating down the river of my mind

  

I am floating in a pool of water, in complete darkness. The amniotic fluid of the universe. The temperature of the water and temperature of the air around me are exactly the same. I am weightless. My body has the same rhythmic movement as a fish gliding through water. I can feel my body moving side to side, but it isn’t. But it is. My body is heavy but not overly heavy, not cumbersome. There is no sound, only a faint hum in the back of my mind and everything is black. A black I cannot describe. A black that doesn’t even exist in the human mind.

 

I am floating and this is all there is to it, to life. My mind trails off  to thoughts of candied orange peel as I float weightless in this amniotic fluid of the universe. To a human cell it is as simple as dividing in two. To the cavemen it was foraging. To native Americans it was telling the stories of their ancestors. To a newborn it is as simple as making cooing sounds. For me it is the thought of candied orange peel.

And it wasn’t even snowing 

 

I had a vision, like a late spring day where the sun was glimmering off the melting snow in such a way that I would have a perfect memory of it 40 years later.

A sonorous pattering

  

There is a beautiful silence in the air except for the gentle drip of water from my coffee cup as I rinse it in the sink. A sonorous pattering of random droplets on forty-year-old porcelain. A silence except for the popping of water as it heats up in the pipes in the walls. A silence except for the sound of a key turning in the door of the apartment down the hall, followed by the footsteps of another human being I have never seen in the last four years. Even the silence of the road less traveled outside my balcony door on this Christmas day. The creaking of old wood from my chair as I shift restless. The silence in between these quiet things is beautiful.  

© Ken Tomaro

Ken Tomaro

Ken Tomaro is a writer living in Cleveland Ohio whose work reflects everyday life with depression. His poetry has appeared in several online and print journals and explores the common themes we all experience in life. Sometimes blunt, often dark but always grounded in reality.

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