o.T. Boy

Time constantly descends upon me. I stumble backwards to salvage fragments of memory, keep fear at bay, suppress the rising floods beneath the calm surface. Isn't it strange that we don't know who we are? I mean, we know so little about ourselves, it's appalling. We tell ourselves a story and continue to believe it, and then it turns out that it's the wrong story, which means we've lived the wrong life. Erase, reduce, take away, make visible, become clear, breathe deeply. What remains? Lostness, banality, irony, and - a shrug of the shoulders. In my memory, I am ten. Like this boy. It has to be a boy. Am I ten? Maybe I'm eleven. Actually, I can't relate to ten or eleven anymore - can I? Yes. I am in this memory. Sun over the sea. I am nervous, musty iron smell of the bark on the knife. Glowing lavender hue of the evening sky, as if the water were covered with a skin of light purple light. What am I doing here? A whirlwind of memories, I take a breath, the sudden pain. That's what we never see because we're inside it, not outside it, and most of us can't remember habitual processes except as a blurred routine.