a thought.

The icon on the bottom of my computer screen is blinking. It’s telling me that the battery is almost dead. It’s a funny thing, battery. You can’t tell the difference between a full battery or a low battery, just when there’s no battery. And when the juice is gone, there is no more access. Access to essential components of my life and to the world in a virtual sense, are denied to me by a blank black screen.

On the screen there is a little window that is a slideshow of a folder of pictures that I have chosen the computer to show. I labeled this folder “Him and I.”

I remember the first time we met. (There are no pictures for that, only the resulting occasions spent with each other). I was away from home for the first time by myself and more than a thousand miles from home. The flights were long but exciting and I was so nervous for my adventure as an adult.

Within the first day or two at the college on the east coast, our mutual friends introduced us. I remember he was wearing a black button up shirt and khaki shorts and was tossing a football back and forth between his hands. He was one of those tall all-american boys.

Back and forth went the football.

Over and over.

It wasn’t until the dance in the gymnasium that we were sitting against the wall a safe distance apart and I leaned my head against his shoulder. I do that all the time now.

It’s been 5 weeks since I’ve seen him.

I keep telling myself that at least he’s not at war at least it won’t be for much longer. I don’t think I could ever understand what it is like to be a wife of a soldier. The constant worry and thought in the back of your mind that you might never see them again.

It would drive me into a mental institute like my aunt.

My mother used to tell me that she was just sick. As I grew up I learned sick did not necessarily a disease of the body that makes your cough and tired, but that people can also be sick in their minds. I had never gotten sick in my head. Was it like a headache?

Or like when you drink a little too much Coke and you can’t go to sleep at night…. It was something to think about.

Sometimes I wonder how many people actually spend time thinking.

Like actually thinking, not just deciding what to wear, what to eat or what way to go to work today:

I bet the number of people thinking “I” as in themselves is much greater than the number people thinking “it.”

And that leads me to ask, what do people think about other than everyday thinking. I am sure I could never comprehend the thinking of philosophers, researchers or other knowledge based professions but I still have the ability to recognize the potential subject matter of which they might be thinking. It stands to wonder what types of thing I don’t account for in general terms when wondering.

Then I remember the time I thought about how many heartbeats are in the world, and of those how many beat *now* and *now.* this makes for a pretty strange random thought…

I was cleaning up my desk the other day and I found a piece of loose leaf paper with a note to myself written in blue-green sharpie. At the top of the note is a hole from a push pin where I had haphazardly attached it to my bulletin board.

I remembered how I had laid in bed staring at the dark ceiling thinking about the concept of God and how He interacts with time.

It had been somewhat of a tangent we had taken during class. We had been reading the Bible and other related books when one of the philosophers brought up the issue of God and His placement in time. It is quite a mind boggling thing to contemplate, a being so great it is not subject to the laws of time. Time is a funny thing, is it not?

I cannot remember yesterday’s lecture well enough to regurgitate it for an exam but sneaking up to the water tower in the middle of the night to spray paint “Remember, Smile” during my summer after freshman year at college is clear as day.

That summer my brother and I became partners in crime, doing things that our parents would not be proud of us for (as any normal parent should) but inducing adrenaline highs well worth any potential consequences. They never found out. I let the freedom of my hand do the work, letting the intersecting lines lead to shapes and color.

And I put those on my wall. And on other walls, secret walls. These walls were ones no one saw, at least not unless you lived there. The people under the bridges made themselves scarce during the daytime, leaving protesting artists who can afford nothing but a spray can and a public wall as their canvas to do our work.

As you hear the cars rush over your head you wonder what it would be like to be in another’s shoes, or no shoes for that matter. I wonder what it’s like to sleep at night with the open air and nothing but a noisy clunking bridge overhead. And then I wonder how many times I’ve driven over someone’s head in my Jeep Cherokee, jolting them awake in the middle of the night or just being another swoosh of many cars lulling someone to sleep.

Sleep seems to transport your mind to another world where your thoughts become someone else’s or someone else’s yours. It traps you in a state of unconscious knowing but most of the time it passes in the blink of an eye.

Time again. God again. Memory again. Thought again. The mind again.

Think. . .