The Egg (Every Now and Again)

It felt like waking up inside an egg, and maybe that’s exactly what it was. My head was clear but I remembered all of it. And while I couldn’t see it, I sensed its presence. I felt no lips moving yet we talked.

“You want to go back, don’t you?” was the first thing it told me.

I’ll spare you trying to describe what it sounded like. I couldn’t do the sensation justice and would only come across as the kind of person you’d want to shut up unless you’d been there.

“Yes,” I thought – or said; the difference was blurry but the intention so clear. “Yes, I wanna go back.”

“You want to go back to that time. No more, no less… you seem so sure of it, much more so than many.”

And I was. I couldn’t recall a special day, but I recalled a time when things were simpler – a feeling that I felt in a place where I belonged when the world was at my feet, before I’d so callously crossed certain roads so clear to me now.

“I wanna be back there.”
I said it, I felt it.

“There are other options, you know.”

I never considered that, but there it was. Another option.

My head was light, as if I’d just had a good night’s sleep with no drinking, none too many smokes to remind me of them in the morning; a morning with the window open and birds serenading the dawn of a gorgeous day, the touches of a sweet dream fleeting on my fingertips.

“Things will be different then, very much so.”

“Will I still be me, then?”

“As much as ever if you ask me, and nothing like it if you were to compare. These things are not easy to explain in terms you can fully understand.”

“Try me, would you?”

A pause, if I could call it that.

“You won’t know either way of what was to come, but you will have better instinct, child. Intuition. Your gut feeling will be stronger, so to speak.”

“I’m not done, not yet. I know that. And I could’ve done so much better.”

“You still can, if you want. But you won’t know any better or worse no matter what choice you make next.”

I had to let that one sink in – I couldn’t tell you for how long – but I was sure, in the end, that it didn’t matter. At least for me it didn’t. You might have opted for the escape into something else. You might have felt different in your egg, but I had my feelings in mine.

No words formed after that – only a very strong feeling subsided, as well as a mutual understanding. Details fleeted in between, the ones that mattered and made things clear. A strong need persevering, a longing for another shot.

I woke up again and let the real world in.

It all felt comfortably familiar, like I’d been there before.

But if you’d ask me later, you’d tell me who doesn’t feel like that every now and again.

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