Reading from an old account I wrote. Is it a construction, the images simply conjurations? Was the dream real? I remember it… or writing it… Is this fiction, too?
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I heard him, I remember hearing him, but I could not recognize the voice attached to the image. I remember him, I think. I remember pictures of him — no memories palpable, no primary recollections, everything palimpsests, a few degrees separate from the reality that was his skin and spirit — perhaps this is his spirit: whispers down the lane, the gradual distortion with every pass becoming like estranged ripples, drifting further and further away in the clouded water; their source, the initial impact, only an estimation, an inscrutable abstraction, the ripples enmeshed and woven into their sibling ripples, warped and esoteric, their father untraceable and they themselves too eventually forgotten and reduced to stagnation, the only hint at their being the entrenched rock shrouded by the sediment it itself disturbed. Always the sediment settles and the water flatlines. There are a million rocks lying in the bed of the pond but the only one that matters to me is the one that splashed me with its violent disposal. Soon I will forget the rock, and by which tree it was thrown, and into which pond, and in which wood, and then I too will flatline and I too will lie with the innumerable stones in their innumerable ponds in some forgotten wood, never to be disturbed again.