just driving, picked up korean for lunch, warm soup on a cold day, spicy hot soup really fits the bill, even if the bulgogi is quite tempting (and damn they know how to make fries), but anyway, on my way back to the office, the sun is kind of obscured, just a diffused globe hanging there lost against the wash of gray, I see some birds off in the distance, as I am sitting at a light, wondering why the guy in the tesla a) does not pull up all the way b) is way too close to my lane for my liking, but back to the sky, birds, we just accept they are as they are, I wish to imagine a time when I didn’t know them, or perhaps if I was blind and this is the first time I laid eyes on them, these little darting black triangles dashing all over the sky just far enough out where they are more like outlines, some gliding majestically as if by magic or string, forgetting my knowledge of thermodynamics, I have a hard time trying to imagine, or grasp, what I might think these little devils were without the context of the knowledge that traps me, we watch dragons and zombies on screens but here, in the sky are creatures just as unlikely, just familiar, just known, so we forget the experience, the first time, I try to think back, when did I first see or recognize birds, I would have to say my earliest memories, which do not even seem like mine anymore as they age and fade like old photographs in a box tucked in the corner of my closet somewhere, my earliest time had to be the shore, the beach, the memories seem like a legend now or a bedtime story I am telling myself, I feel out of my body, looking at myself in the past, molding wet sand with art deco neon color plastic buckets, the blazing sun turning my blonde locks near white and making my neck resemble a lobster cooked with freckles, looking up, watching the seagulls hover, standing still in the wind almost like my kite, the pipers playing tag with the surf, back and forth, scampering toward them with my child legs, they do not know I mean no harm but they stay just out of length, probably for the best, but I love to watch them pace back and forth, to this day, the constant tide, the ride, back at my office I arrive, trying to retain a child’s eye, trying to remember what it was like… those first times, for every piece of worldly fabric we may take for granted…