A Paragraph on the Pillow (A Small Anatomy of Attachment)

I saw the pillow on my walk—laying against the tree where I had left it two days before.

My eyes fell on it from a block away as I was approaching it. The thought that it would probably still be there had passed through my mind with negligible notice like the thoughts that followed that one but when I saw the pillow it appeared with a kind of shock, all at once. It was a discarded artifact, without a history, a meaningless digital cast off and this was accompanied by the strange feeling of contradiction as though in seeing the pillow laying against the tree, abandoned, I was looking at, rather than hearing, an actual lie and this occurred simultaneously with the oddly astonishing sudden realization that it was I who knew it had a history and just what it was, like a parent stumbling upon a lost child. It was my history: ‘me’ was laying against the tree. I was amazed and a little stunned and then deeply moved at its sudden possession of meaning, with the fact of my suddenly knowing that its history was mine and then for a while Elizabeth’s and mine. It was me and then us laying against that tree. It was not a sentimental response at all which detours around the authentic experience of an event and so obliterates what is real in it, instead this was the simple sudden impact of something unexpected but radically true and which came at me to quick to dodge or evade with mental or emotional maneuvers.

I picked it up and carried it back home which is where I felt the first small contaminating presence of a small element of sentiment enter into the previous epiphany. Now it sits on my front porch where it accrues the mysterious weight of meaning, that grows from the seed of attachment into the only bliss that bondage contains.