Paramnesia

-Then, the years before, all of them having transpired, faded into the darkness of the space where time melts away to and remains just out of reach, like the faint glimmer, a lost refraction of light and the hope of a moment. There was that moment. A moment which became a memory, which gave life to the ghost of time’s possibility, which is what I still search for near the dawning of twilight, as the remnants of light become entertained and lost in their own games with shadows. And how should I describe it? There was laughter, and words; a deluge of them raining down upon us. We plucked them from the space around us as they poured, as if the scenes we inhabited had already been written and we found ourselves the little characters on the page, maintaining order amidst the myriad possibilities of meaning, of what could mean, and of what we meant. We found ourselves, the imagination of a greater divine and universal creative force, placing us there in the deluge, causing our hearts to beat, our minds to fill from neurological impulse and the chemistry therein which made us and worked upon us. A gravitational force which fixed our orbit and aligned our meaning.
Her hair, given to its own revelry, moved as if in dance, lifted by the whispers words make as they cascade. If I close my eyes and focus on those moments, now, years behind, if time does not bend, it takes time for the fragments to be culled from the shards of the memories of my meandering path among ten thousand things. They are what I remembered one day, long after. The backdrops remain. These are the stages upon which life takes place, where myriad moments have gone unnoticed. Each fragment is embedded as if it had always been there, as if the memory was whole. But as the mechanism of memory works to piece together what remains, I feel the strain. I am assaulted by the thought that in the end there is no difference between what I believe happened and what I dream. And there is no certainty of who she was, or that she existed at all. She’s always existed in my dreams and my memories, yet I could not identify her if she were real. At this height, it is impossible to tell which fragments I’ve constructed to hold together others, and which were the others. They are all a bit worn, each placed and misplaced along the continuing projection that is the illusion of my existence. And still that glimmer behind it all sets me searching in the ethereal moments, in which all things can be real, for something that may never have been.
This is where I start. This is the memory I have created, concocted, or, perhaps, actually experienced.
The stages remain, unlit, in the shadows waiting for the fragmented parade of my attempts to prove that there was something before this moment in which I sit and attempt to recall it. I can see the night, and its windchill returns, along with the scent of frost. The light spills onto corners and quiet streets, with the occasional swoosh of cars fracturing the light’s streams and sending their refractions onto sidewalks, the way puddles splash. Light collides into the little coffee shop’s windows and falls onto the scattered tables outside. She sits there. But looking back, now, from this distance she appears as light, as essence, her features fade in the glow of her. I sat there, across from her, somehow knowing the scene had already been performed, thousands of times in a myriad lifetimes, and that we could never talk about ourselves in the present, then, in that moment. We didn’t, not a word, except for the scribbled characters on a napkin, which she refused to let me finish, insisting I should tell her. And I did. My simple juvenile translation of those characters, those lines written from left to right and from top to bottom. I held back. My smile worked against the undertow inside. I felt those little characters in black ink, bleeding through the napkin, were more powerful, more sacred, and held more possibility than anything I could utter. But I acquiesced her. I leaned in close, breathing in deeply the scent of her, and it froze my words so that all I managed was a whisper, I think of you. It shook her with the shiver of soft laughter. Then her eyes met mine and it was clear nothing further was needed. She understood. Her breath was her reply. Its own soft whisper meaning more than the characters on the napkin.
If I am here and this progression of projection means anything, that was the moment. Everything around it becomes superfluous. Whether the moments before the arrival of dusk held any moths eating away at the seams of the day’s anxieties, or whether, after we parted, I drove across the floors of silent streets, with the different lamps of street lights switching out hues, or even, if I did, in fact, finally indulge that occasionally entertained desire to drive off the edge of the concrete into one abyss or another. The entirety of my existence, of which I have no proof, comes down to that moment. If anything means now, or has meant since, ever, it is simply because it existed on the same timeline, the same progression, the same concatenation of projection.
I’ve returned to that moment, those fragments, countless times. Often the sudden subtlety of night will fall upon me and I’ll hear a hushed whisper, and I’ll feel the quivering within. I’ll stave off the undertow and I’ll be drawn back, in the same way consciousness often returns after our ephemeral disappearances into oblivion. The stage will stir from the shadows and suddenly alight. It appears, at first, like shadow magic. A dance of shadows, amorphous, until like thoughts finding words, they find their form. There, in the moment before they do, I find her scent, a scent I’ve never found again, and it inundates me the way a storm thunders and echoes in the ruins of cathedrals. The words flutter from their migration in memory, amidst culled recollection and crafted truth, then, like raindrops, saturate the landscape and the moment, filling both. The stories of castles, and the castles we built, then, exist again but for a breath. Her laughter echoes behind the cascade of the meaning we attempted, and though we meant it, could never simply admit. Then, the night, the moment, is again eerily quiet. We stand before each other, unable to reach out to disrupt the space between us. Had I dared, perhaps we’d still be standing there, healed in each other. But given that weakness, she fades, and I remain unable to discern between the deceptions of time and the deceptions of self.