Falling back into the space which still holds his form, onto the pillow which still hasn’t forgotten the curvature of his head. He breathes in deeply and closes his eyes a little longer. Life continues beyond moments and beyond dreams. If only we could construct brackets around the best of these and exist there within them without care for what came before or what follows [here is what stands out most and what you’ll remember]. There is no way he could return to sleep in the brief time he has left, but he imagines that he could and attempts to invoke the sensation of a pulse beating against his skin.
Time sweeps by, the way it does, all its unanswered questions in tow, adding to the mounting barrage of knowledge the universe will never entrust to the human mind. The birds chirp outside the window, the light cascades in and ricochets off of flat surfaces and fills the space; the soundtrack of quotidian experience creeps in from outside: the sounds of cars rushing past, the echoing bark of a dog at a distance, the wind hushing the morning frenzy. He stands there, the bathroom’s bulbs assailed by the morning’s ricochets. As he picks up his razor and inspects the stubble on his chin, they return like flashbulb strobes, the way memory creeps in after a night of heavy drinking, and with it the quiver of hangover. The moments [those he would’ve placed in brackets if time could be made to move in its opposite direction so he could tell himself to recognize them before they were gone]. It is a medley, a type of bricolage of experience, a curated collection: breaths, glances, laughter, the warm and calming sensation of healing in a mutual embrace, the quivering that follows a resonant kiss, the transcendent experience of fusing beyond temple bones. There’s also the breaking. That’s not there. It is not part of these strobes, but it does imbue the whole with a kind of undertow. As if the moments he would place within brackets were not far enough, having been left in a past he cannot unearth, but as if they were held within their own parenthesis through the fracturing of each relationship and thusly moved farther away in time’s trajectory so that even if he managed to find the mechanism that allows linearity to flip, these parentheses would exist so far away that they would be beyond his own lifeline and the lifetimes of its experience. Thus, haunting every experience with, if nothing else, the knowledge that even if by miracle or tragedy he could go back and reconstruct what he imagines to be the major moments of his existence, these would always be impossible to reach.
His eyes draw shut as he presses the cold blades of the razor to his skin. He holds it there a moment before dragging it across a stretch where the five o’clock shadow has marked its space, where the hours of night have darkened the outlines. He thinks back to the suspirations in the susurration of night. The light breeze of those crepuscular moments drying the perspiration that forms between bodies. He wonders how long the memory will be one he can access, how long they’ll construct memories together, and whether enough of these can build to something more, beyond the temporal.