I caught this to share with you…
I watched the night sky crack over and over again.
The pulses of light were like memories returned.
A few moments (a long, thirteen second exposure) calcified, concentrated on my screen (once the vocal billows rumbled past and I could plug in again), and the fine, reaching, efflorescent threads appeared and yes, this is precisely how it feels to have lost moments returned after a decade or more.
One small sparkle reaches and branches into more crackles into cracks like a heavy foot on the lake, not yet settled fully into winter.
People can tell me a memory, but it just doesn’t feel true, organic, like the deep in me every cell, electrifying every nerve of a firsthand memory, and these second hand memories just can’t capture the intricacies of how my senses & mind focus and capture each morsel, waft, tactile, auditory, proprioceptive vision in an overloaded, carnival ride.
Each large crack, each branch, each baby eyelash and hair-thin thread a sensory memory, each grouping creating a breathing, visual, auditory, wildly flavorful, supersaturated, olfactory snapshot in time, in my strange and wonderful curious, thirsty, synesthetic, autistic, insomniac, famished brain.
It is electrifying.
It moves my limbs ever forward, seeking the tiniest splinter to restore conduction, to send out the dendritic heat and light so the bits and bobs form, what is for me, a complete memory, to fill the gaps where darkest shadow conceals unknown depths and a dragon or two
Exposed by the flash, the beasties and dragons pass control back to me and I can safely reach out, touching scales and jagged rock. Once I can feel the textures, and smell the sweaty mineral condensate and feel the radiant ginger spiced hotness of breath, and a slice of greyed sunlight falls on faces again, then I can set my pack down and explore before the calm and the darkest, soundless, healing, most welcome sleep embraces me.
-b.
Accidental Thong 