bits and pieces
In a moment of stillness, my mind dissipates like a veil of fog atop a tranquil lake. Thoughts disperse upon one another, falling into a cloud of slow dust, and a breeze passes by, tangling with the fog and making curling clouds, as though the air itself were dreaming. The wind caresses the unbroken surface of the lake; its light touch makes the faintest dips upon its reflection, waves ripple gently and disappear after moments, the lake unmoving once again, as if nothing at all had disturbed its serenity.
I don't remember the first time I came here. If that is just how this place works, or if time has quietly eroded away at my mind, leaving only little hollows where memories ought to be, I can't tell. But I feel like this was never always the same way it is now; it used to be brighter and have more doors and windows. At some point, they disappeared bit by bit, the bustling of the city and song of the birds ceasing and fading slowly, and now there is only one of each --- but I don't dislike it, strange as that may seem. It sounds like something sad has happened but everything has always been perfectly fine, yet things change anyway, and perhaps there is no particular injustice in that, since the world ought not to ask permission before altering its shape.
I also used to be able to hear the visitors, but not in the way you might expect. Their voices always seemed blurry and distant, like echoes coming from the insides of a great hollow cavern, but quiet and almost faded, as though they had traveled a very long way merely to whisper something to me. I always had a hard time trying to understand anything, I could only catch, sometimes, a few fragments of words and try to piece them together to make something out of them --- by the time I had made something of them, their owners' silhouettes were long gone, leaving faint afterimages of memory, as if they were only illusions from the beginning.
By making patchworks of words and meanings like that, doesn't that make me the owner of them, at this point? I spent way too much time turning someone else's things into mine, no wonder they got bored and left, can't blame them. But still, there had to be other, better ways to go about it --- and I rather wish I had known them. But if you ask me, I wouldn't know, neither then nor now, but that is just how things are sometimes, is it not?
At some point, the crayons I used to draw words and convenient scenarios had absorbed all that spoke, then turned translucent, dotted their own outlines, and erased themselves out of existence. Their disappearance, brought about by the waves of the cosmic oceans repeatedly bathing reality's shore with their glow, robbed colors of their luster ~ the gentle sounds of the waves echo inside my mind to this day. If I close my eyes I can see it, the waves crash, phasing through my body, and scatter afterimages of myself back and forth, like reflections from a hundred mirrors, each one keeping a little piece of me.
Is that a bad thing? I don't remember how I felt about it then, but looking back now, blurry as it is, I can't find it bad at all, after all, just the remembrance of these glassy memories brings me some sort of relief, and what is it that has gone away? whoosh ~ it doesn't matter anymore. Let me be translucent myself and dot away to the sea's breeze, the waves washing my colors bit by bit. And then, I become one with the air and the wind, which carries me along and separates me into tiny particles that scatter all over the world, to nowhere and everywhere at once.
Each little fragment would land in far and distinct places, some lost forever, sinking deep into the ocean's depths and many rivers, others falling upon the soil and getting buried deep into the earth for many years to come. Would something sprout of it, I wonder? Maybe, by chance, some would land upon someone like snowflakes and disappear entirely, never to be seen again. Fading bit by bit, the fragmented consciousness sleeps soundly for an untold amount of time...
The monochrome sounds of the room manifest as dark formless hands that drag me back to reality, my mind flies through a vertical tunnel without end back to one of its entrance out of the dark pit, making light reflect upon my eyes once again, bodily sensations signaling the daydream's end. As if made of countless glass panels, I feel frames of myself piling upon one another forcefully, the impact cracking the ones below, beautiful thorns spring upon each surface, painting a mosaic atop the combined panes --- its me.