Jelly

Driving around in the dead of night. Hot wind blows between two windows rolled down. The humidity clings heavy to your skin. You were on a time limit. Everyone’s always on a time limit. There’s never enough time and when there is there’s just too much of it. There were things that needed to be done in the morning. Just as the birds rose and the sun peeked through the clouds. There’s always something else that needs to get done. You’re never finished. Stopping at the nearest corner store with the yellowed lights still on. Time running away behind you, time adding up in front of you. You grab the nearest thing to the counter not wanting to waste anymore of it. The wonder lust still races in your mind. You get back into the truck. Start the engine and pull out of the tiny needs to be repaved parking lot. The little restless voice in the back of your head quieted for a few minutes. You open the package your eyes never leaving the road. Your voice slightly hoarse from your sudden inability to stop talking. Talking about everything and nothing. Trying not to think. One after the other you place the cracker into your mouth. You chew in between meaningless chatter swallow fast and move onto the next. You don’t stop. You can’t stop. Not thinking. Not speaking. Not listening. Not watching. Not feeling. Not time. You taste something a little odd. Something that you know you shouldn’t. Something sweet. Something comforting and inviting. A taste you’re not use to in your bland little world but you don’t stop. You can’t stop. Not chewing. Not driving. Not the restlessness. Not the rain that had begun to fall. It isn’t until you’re forced to hit the brakes as the light turns red that you taste that sweet thick taste. That something that makes you stop for a minute and maybe smile slightly. You look down the package of six tiny crackers now empty and you realize there is something a little different about them. You reach down and lift the package into the red light and read. Turns out your plain grabbed by chance six little packaged crackers aren’t just peanut butter. That sweet taste is jelly. Grape fresh and new. Lively and exciting in its small little way. Anything better than the bland six little crackers you thought you had been eating. You sit there for a minute looking down at the empty package and realize this is the first new thing that’s happened to you in weeks and you wasted it. The highlight of your endless day and its gone before you realized what was happening. The light turns to green and your foot lifts from the brake and you start to move again. It’s about now that you start to wonder how many other times has this happened? How many other things have slipped through the cracks time pushing it all away. You missing all of those little things that make everything worthwhile. How long have you been running through life never stopping to savor what’s around you. Now I ask how many of us have been missing the jelly that’s been handed to us never stopping to notice it was there in the first place.

Strange are the things that come from the minds of the sleep deprived.