I am this moment, yours.

Sit with me a while.

I’ve caught your attention, fleetingly, in between the everything-else of your world. What were you just doing? What’s next? What’s been hooked in the nets of your memory today? Which moments stand out?

I want you to remember them, one at a time. Hold them gently in the cupped palms of recollection, then give them wings and let them go. Not because they don’t matter, but because I want you here. With me. Just for a short time.

I’ll let you go back to reality in a few minutes, but I’d love you to just settle and let me fill your thoughts with mine. I want you to notice the shapes of my words as they flow through your eyes and spark meaning in your neural pathways. I want you to remember that on this side of the screen, I thought of you as I wrote.

The process occurred in reverse, for me ;your face held in my mind, and a slight smile on my lips as I imagine the light in your eyes. I pictured the tilt of your head as you read, and hoped that somehow my thoughts of light and love and beauty would flow alongside the impulse driving me to pin my thoughts to this space in the World Between the Wires. Tap. Tap. Tap. Taptaptaptaptap. Each letter a mark on space and time, collectively encompassing a whole thought – I care, and I want you to know it.

Do you know me?

If you do, you know that behind the glitter and *twinklysparkliness* I like to throw around, and beyond the laughter and anointing-with-gold, I sometimes find my feet swept out from under me. Mists roll in and surround me in roiling grey, sunshine a precious memory in those hours that feel like weeks. In those moments, when all is sliding, I’ve found the only way to keep from being lost is to cling. To those my heart is hardwired to. To those with whom I’m entering the tentative dance of early friendship. To you?

Where better to find sure footing against an invisible adversary than in an imaginary place? The World Between the Wires has once more provided sanctuary – time and time again I’ve retreated into the forests of its sphere, and found solace by its still pools; peace in the arms of those whose minds are apt to care. Yours?

Maybe so, and I’m grateful.

I’m thankful for your time. For your time RightNow, and for the space in your mind which has permitted me entry, allowed me to curl up with your psyche, and sink in. It’s comfy here and I rather like it. You’ve given me brain-space, but I promise to be a good house-guest. I’ll leave you with wafts of your favourite scent, and recommend that for the view, you think of a time when you stood in nature and were breath-taken by its splendour. Where were you?

I’m thankful, and in return, I give you my time. My thoughts. A peek inside the mist (still star-spun, though dimmed for now) and the knowledge that in spite of the swamping of tides, the cloying mud of depression which hampers my movements and exhausts me, I’m determined. A small, bright core is shining like candlelight within a dark effigy, “I have a Plan”, and though it flickers – wavering as my hopes are tossed through storms, subject alternately to lightning and blue, shining skies – I will persevere.

I will endure this time of TimeZoned and beyond loops. I will persist in small actions taken every day to wind threads into an eventual safety net, as I plan my leap into the unknowable. I will fight tiredness and apathy and frustration with words which pour in from all corners, like balm to my frazzled soul, from those whose presence keeps me anchored in light, even in my darkness. I will hold tight to you; my lifeboats and silver linings.

As to that future – who knows? Strings of possibilities fly out from the present like beribboned kites, dancing gaily against the cimmerian unknown. Every step I take will shape the next, and in the same way as I am who I am in large part thanks to the sum of my experiences to date (and I wouldn’t change them, for that reason alone), the future-me will be molded by my now. And to an extent, by your part in it.

Those ‘now’s will be strung together like beads on a string – jewels and buttons and bobkins – until their coalescence equates to my ‘forever’. I will look back at what’s been made, and hope to see your face and influence woven with shining threads alongside the times which made me who I turned out to be.

But now, I am this moment, yours.

For I am part of your story, in the same way that you are part of mine.

I thank you for this, your care in reading – in pausing your day to wander through my thoughts – and for being here.

You won’t know it but writing this, I reached out and touched the screen, as though able to reach through it and make contact. It was cool. Blank. Lacked your warmth and softness. But I did it anyway. Likewise your screen lacks mine (if you try), but it seems to me that regardless, the connections are there, tangibly, perhaps just felt in different ways.

And as our fingertips swirl, binding sense-memory to the thoughts herein, we know, we know, the connection is real.