I Had Forgotten All The Things

I had forgotten all the things! How well I remember that day, for it is a memory of nothing…

 

The awareness filled me with despair. Not only had I forgotten all the things – I had forgotten why it was so important that I should not forget them! I had forgotten everything… I made a clawing motion with my mind, trying to remember the things, trying to drag them back out of the blank emptiness of my mind. As if mere force could do it! As if this could be accomplished by some cheap conjuring trick!

 

I tried to pretend that they weren’t so far away – I tried to pretend that I knew what they were, that they were familiar to me, that I could easily bring them back. ‘Oh yes the things,’ I said to myself ‘I know them well. How could I not know them, for they are everything?’ I assured myself that I could never forget all the lovely things. I made more desperate clutching movements with my mind, trying to make good my empty words, my appallingly hollow affirmations…

 

But I was confabulating and I knew it. It was all a transparent hoax. I was confabulating and I knew it well. Notwithstanding this knowledge however I continued – my mind went full steam ahead trying to recreate all the things from scratch, trying to retrieve them in ghost-form from the void into which they had disappeared. My mind was determined in its task and before very long it had resurrected a whole room full of ghost-things, which stood there before me, making faces. My mind was charging ahead and pulling all sorts of crazy half-baked phantasms out of its not-so-deep pockets – it was going to repopulate the world with them if it was the last thing it did. I protested but my mind ignored me – my panicked protests went unheard. My mind never listened to me at the best of times and it certainly wasn’t about to start now! It had its job to do and it was going to do it no matter what I said…

 

Resurrecting the ghost-things was worse than forgetting them in the first place. Far worse, as I was soon to learn. But the genie of my mind had been given its task and no power on earth could stop it! It had been set in motion and that was that. My mind went about its business relentlessly, even if it was doing an appallingly bad job of it. I cannot wash my hands of it either for in some dark way I know I was complicit – it was like one of those times when you do something you know you shouldn’t but the very fact that you know you shouldn’t somehow spurs you on. You want to do it all the more because it is so clearly wrong! The dark perversity that lies within you wills it and you are powerless to resist. And you take pleasure in it…

 

So it was for me on that day. All I could do was look on in horrified fascination. My mind painstakingly resurrected all the things, one by one.  It repopulated the world with them, so that they would be as before – only they weren’t. One by one the spectres appeared, their empty eye-sockets swiveling in my direction, subjecting me to the most baneful of stares. They were accusing me for their creation. They were blaming me for the horror that was unfolding. I tried my best to look as if I knew nothing about it but my attempt to shirk all responsibility fooled no one. Least of all the dreadul hollow-eyed spectres that stood and stared – they stared silently but I knew well what they were saying to me.

 

The world is back again now but what kind of a world is it? Not a good one, I fear. It is far from being a good world. Things there are aplenty but they are not good things. They are far from good. These counterfeit things are no friends of mind, like the things of old used to be. They have a sinister, accusatory presence – as I believe I have already said. They are malign beings and there is no use in pretending otherwise. Their malignancy is undeniable. They crowd in on me from all sides, reminding me of the Wrong Thing that I have done. I deny it of course, but my daily protests of innocence and non-complicity are transparently false. My disingenuous protests only serve to underline my guilt, and make it weigh heavier on my shoulders…

 

 

 

 

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