|mind-gloaming.net|

There is always an image I cannot shake whenever I awaken; for a time the real world is just shadows under my eyes and this image is at the forefront of my vision as the real world reels beneath. I guess it is more accurate to call it a vision, because it’s not just this static image, it’s noise and feeling and sight. I can feel the sun on my face as I mount those stairs, I hear my footsteps and the yawn and slam of the door as I step onto a concrete slab that serves as a front stoop. This place is known to me, known well. That step and that door are part of what I am searching for; they are part of what I once was and therefore part of what I am now. I rub my eyes and stretch my aching back; I walk to a nearby stream and stoop to take a drink from the cool water. Maybe that house is where I need to go? Maybe it’s where I’m running from? Even as I pose those questions I realize that neither matter because that place exists only in my mind. As the memories fade from the present it seems we polish them up, we squint to make out what is left in our minds, we see only what was good and the past is always better. Any attempt to regain or to relive this past is futile. I can’t focus on what has happened, I must focus on what will and what can occur to really live. I feel now as if I might just be reciting some long dead philosopher’s doctrine, how is that any better than an obsession with my origin?

I push aside the questions as I realize that I am hungry. I haven’t eaten in days and collapsing dead from exhaustion on this desolate road will be good for nothing. I stoop again for get some water, walk to where I had slept on top of my thin black jacket pick it up, put it on and stride again onto that lonesome road. There must be stores along this road somewhere, I can get food there. It occurs to me that I can remember words, what a store is, that there are other people beside myself; but I cannot remember my name, my family, my home, my job, my life before I woke up walking along this path and stopped to use that broken phone.