Amorphous-Latent

-His mind floods over with forgotten memories of the people he’s encountered but never met again. Even then, the image eludes him.
He starts to wonder how it is possible that so many conversations and their moments can lie hidden in the mind, forgotten and inaccessible but through an exhaustive plunge into the abyss of memory; and even then, not everything is recovered. Perhaps, they’re the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s. And he remembers his father moping through the house, always with that frustrated look on his face, always searching for something and being unable to find it. The weepy eyes that would result when he’d plop down on the couch, given up. He wished so often, then, that he could give some part of himself so that the scenario wouldn’t play out, that his father wouldn’t go through that daily weakening and that his mother wouldn’t suffer along side him. In those moments, all that mattered was the present impression, no longer, the verbal attacks and beatings he had received at his father’s hands and with his mother’s encouragement. He laughs. It’s funny. Those same moments would call up the few good memories he had of his father and even those of his mother. The few memories he had of kindness toward him as a child under their rein. Everything else vanished, for the moment.
He sits up and stares into the emptiness of the room, searching. Nothing new and nothing left behind. His heart pounding breathing now regulated and light. He lets out a sigh and half smiles, though he doesn’t mean to, and so he forces it off his face. Not that it matters however, there’s no one else around. It’s one of those smiles that will not be remembered, not even by him. Without thinking and without preparing, he finds himself on his feet, his balance misplaced. His head feels woozy, like giving blood on an empty stomach. He blinks hard and catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror. It was only moments ago he recognized the image staring back. Now, an amorphous reflection in the muck of his mind. Has my being dissipated? The thought scurries across his mind as his eyes, having no focus left, close. He collapses.
Dissipating, dissolving, the dissolution of the self. It’s an image he at times recalls as the unlacing of the self, the threads of time and experience as well as that of consciousness, disbanding. It’s intrigued him, the many ways in which the being dissipates. It used to fascinate him that people would give any credence to the stories of spontaneous combustion and the like, not hardly believe, but perhaps simply one of the ways in which the self dissolves. The rarest case he had heard of, of course, in some esoteric journal, not the kind of mainstream media that would be running the same stories on combustion of self that everyone had heard, but a solitary journal, hardly read. A story that was perhaps submitted by a relative of the dissolved. The story of a man who fell asleep and deteriorated over the period of a month, all while in the process of dreaming. At the end, all that was left was hair. At the time, this story frightened him a bit. Not that he is one to easily fright, but he did, he was, frightened. There was something in that story, akin to the belief, when you’re young, that the shriveling of your fingertips and toes, after a lengthy bath, is the beginning of your end. He could feel that sensation running through him for days. Even now, he wakes several times a night just to make sure he has not started to dissolve. Dissolution of the self.
The living room is still a frozen cube in time, his breath a condensed froth emanating into the small space, where now, as about a year ago, there exists a frozen froth on the carpet under the weight of his body. He lies motionless. But for the expansion and collapse of his lungs in his chest. His nose is frozen and his nostrils hardly move as the air rushes in and then pours out. Even his eyes seem still, as underneath the thin covering, his eyes gyrate as if in search of something, creating image of illusion.
Dark stained wooden stairs spiral around a point which may be himself, but he does not see himself. They turn white. There’s a soft sax riff he can barely make out. To him it sounds like a cold wind chill.
He sees himself, or one of the versions of self his mind has created for the specific purpose of identification in dream states. He looks around the room he finds himself in. The spiral stairs leading to heaven become nothing more than a stoop. He sees his eyes and what his eyes see, an overlapped consciousness.
A parade of faces descends from the upper rooms, but he cannot see the upper rooms. Every face is different, he knows this, but he cannot see it. They surround him and become the air around him. He can feel his breathing, labored. And the sweat on his brow, and half consciously he wonders if the living room is warm now.
A woman’s body becomes the staircase, now returned to its former opulence. The staircase becomes a woman’s body and he knows her, though she stands a silhouette, no details, just essence. He smiles, though he is dazed in his dream, but he smiles.
He feels a light wind, perhaps a window open, a scent, toilet water, its sweetness. The silhouette becomes nothing and the stairs are flat and the walls are a lot tighter. Claustrophobia, he thinks. There is a light and a body, and it is her, though he does not know her she is familiar.
A darkness. He is being chased, though he cannot see what is chasing or that it is he, but he can feel the wind dissipating from his lungs and the swinging of his limbs and sweat pouring down. A warmth. A heat. Emanating from his body and he feels he will collapse. There are shadows and he runs to them.