Nostalgia preys on me most nights. Sometimes I fear moments are slipping away from me as my recollections of your face fade into the dark corridors of my memory. I discover myself hanging to the details of recent photographs of you, whilst struggling to recall for myself. Flowers reverse in bloom and crawl up the spring of a lifetime being; their nature to wither, denied. You have become still life in the distance dictated by the foaming sea. Who is this person I call “you”? A painting I dare not see up close, antigravitational force pulling me near, threatening gaze thrusting me further away, but marauding on every step. I terrify at the very thought of the sea becoming shallow. The fear and necessity of touch of that which kills, a poison that spreads deep from within the vein. The oxygen turning to fumes in my lungs. Drawing breaths of life that kill inside. Eight thousand nine hundred twenty-three blinks at an average speed of six minutes per breath drawn, totalling fifty-three thousand, five hundred and thirty-eight deaths. Each step another ghost. Each back a bit of peace regained. It feels like eating truffles out of the orchids where everlasting promises perished. In the humming dark of oblivion, the echoing sound of flesh against ivory, the keys subdued to speed engulf my unconsciousness. I continuously circle around the piano searching for a face, the necessity to reconstruct my memory pulls me nearer, an ever-turning compulsion never to be satisfied, met only by a silent back and absorbed shoulders, those eyes focused on the keys and my picture before him, a satiric epitaph of a marriage. To serve a sentence of eyes fixed on the back of someone’s shoulders never to see a face turn to me, as they progressively become the shoulders of a stranger, a name I cannot recall and comes to me by night, slithers into the canals of my ears and silently whispers into the unsoundness of my dreamless sleep, a name that escapes my tongue. I once knew this sound, a mantra I cried myself to sleep with and now cannot grasp, cannot fathom. My mouth, my teeth, my tongue know not how to articulate this sound. The agony of a know that wastes like water in my hands, dissolves into smoke, a time that never was. Inconsolable pain to have lost that which I have forgotten. A despair of unknown abandonment, unnamed, anonymous perpetrator, indistinguishable cause. Uncontrollable wailing from within my entrails quickly claws its way up my throat, my face soaked and salted from weeping in a timeless circle, as the most paralysing confusion is oblivious to where the anguish comes from. What is it that I yearn for? I strain to remember what has inflicted on me such unwavering sorrow. What was once something dissolved into nothingness. The dream of a man sitting at a piano, the yearning consuming my breath dissipates away from the waking mind again by the time the new sun dawns. Once more, the everlasting dies ephemeral.
