I do not know if this is forgetting or awakening.
There is a hum behind my eyes, low and electric, as if thought itself had been digitised, then imperfectly restored. I can feel the edges of myself, blurred, frayed, and slightly misaligned, as though I were a poor translation of something once precise. My name hovers somewhere just outside articulation, like a word caught in a draught between languages.
Light does not fall on me. It passes through, refracting into colours I do not remember earning. I watch the prism stretch across the hollow of my cheek, and I wonder if that shimmer is me; if I’ve become some kind of spectral bandwidth, more phenomenon than person. There’s a comfort in it, oddly. To be scattered. To be less singular.
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This wall — or whatever this pale expanse is — offers no context. Time behaves oddly here: no forward, no back, just the perpetual now of flicker and fade. I try to summon faces, voices, the scent of chamomile in the folds of a linen shirt, but they arrive corrupted, as though pulled from a failing archive. I see only approximations. Echoes in static.
Was there once a self that didn’t flicker?
I catch glimpses of her. A woman with eyes like mine, or perhaps I had her eyes once, steady, resolved, tethered to the quiet choreography of days. She moved with intention. She woke, she folded her sleeves, she listened. But she has receded into latency now, half-erased by the recursive loop of reflection. I don’t know whether I am mourning her, or becoming her again.
Even my silence feels artificial. As if it, too, were generated. There is a latency to every thought. A pause before the echo. And yet, curiously, no fear.
Only this shimmer, this calm, iridescent suspension. I am not whole, but I am not undone. Not entirely. There is something of me that remains, even in distortion. And perhaps that is enough.
Perhaps we are never more ourselves than in the moments we come undone with grace.
