I am remembering you today. Someone who is not you and yet, is, triggered it. Like a gun, warm and powder-coated; the bullet is in my brain, bouncing against bone, somehow halted before exit and richoceting. Gristly analogy, but fitting; it feels like a reverse lobotomy. I do not want to remember this feeling.
Frustration is like a vise; each push against it only brings it closer, tightening against skin. The metaphors flash and flicker; the shutter-stop of mind making white space between them. Paw in steel trap, gnawing at it for freedom. Hook in the mouth and grimacing as the pull begins to tear. Little vortex in time, a singularity, dense and insistent, drawing me back again and again.
Why?
It is a herculean thing, but I am laughing for the ease of it as I heave up and outward and throw it away. It will return. But not for a time. Sag with relief, too numb to feel the limb throb for missing the paw; too relieved at wriggling free and swimming; all silver flash and trailing gore, upstream; too giddy for slipping gravity’s pull to care where I now fly.
Away and away and away. Metaphors gather like sugar over the sheath as all things bunch and coil and prepare for escape. No, this will not be a repeated misery. No, there will not be quiet waiting and resignation. No, I rebuke recognition of every bit of it and slam the door upon the phantom; trembling hands twisting locks and bolts and bars into place.
I turn and face the silent room and almost manage not to glance immediately to the small stone figure that rests upon the mantle; the shapes of humans that create one another; standing with arms endlessly reaching and for it, endlessly apart.
The circuit is complete and the entirety of the pattern glows for it. The focused light makes a pinpoint prick against the ceiling. I close my mental eye and feel the shudder ripple and pass over me. This place is filled with the echoes of you; silent waves and entrophy; all the things that are now unavailable.
Like us.