Imagine suffering a complete memory loss, an existential crisis that resonates with your first days on earth, when your mind was still a blank canvas having no knowledge of the inside and outside. Imagine losing any sense of who you are, who others are, and where you are. How would you move through the world and negotiate for support and protection? You would be like a newborn who knows nothing, being at the mercy of strangers to maintain your well being, but without an inkling as to their intentions. Your fear of the unknown manifested in nightmarish proportions.
Category: Reposts
Grimace
Dreaming on my bed cross-legged
Surrounded by still images:
memories, so to speak –
thousands of them
scattered and strewn
across the sheets,
carpeting the floor
from wall to wall.
Disorderly piles of them
like mountains and valleys
rising and falling
No rhyme or reason.
Her Smile
Hey Anne,
Found this poem in one of Isaac’s boxes. Do you know anything about this woman? Did she really exist? Doubtful huh? 10,000 miles? Not sure anyone would travel 5 miles to visit a loon, except for social workers. Just being real, not mean. I’ve always loved our little brother, but his issues pushed everyone away.
Our ghost, Mr. Shrink, is back again. Poor Isaac!
Be careful, the paper is dried out. Looks like something chewed on it. Wash your hands afterwards!
Lizzy
Sleepwalking
I felt “watched” whenever the moonlight streamed into my bedroom window at night, paranoid that God used the moon as his lookout – probing me from there with his powerful flashlight. I didn’t want “him” to see what I daydreamed about in my bedroom. Not that it was anything bad or abnormal for a 12 year old, but I didn’t want my parents finding out and meddling in my private stuff.
Old man in the gym
Gazing into the gym mirror, old man Isaac observes a bloated belly; a fat neck that balloons out in every direction; skin transitioning to wrinkled leather; a generous portion of randomly scattered skin tags; arms and a chest with no muscle tone; bony, stick figure like legs; and a head gone bald. Yet, Isaac persists in turning this way and that way, searching for his 25 year old in the mirror, hoping to find a vestige of his youth somewhere in the reflections. For now though, every angle in every mirror shows the accumulated wear and tear of many years of despair, with no sign of the young, physically virile man of his past.
Notes from David 