10

Memory is not to be trusted. It’s as mendacious as the shimmer on the surface of a placid lake. Providing an illusion of calm, while beyond the sunless depths the sand and silt are littered with rocks and the debris of life. And there within the roots of a drowned tree, a pike lurks with hate in its unseeing eyes.

I’m trapped in sleep and I can’t wake up.

I grab for truth but it eludes me. Slips from my grasp like vapour. I see a face distorted, as if plundered from a Picasso painting. I read the anger. Take all of the blame.

I’m in a dream but I enter memory.

I’m looking into a shattered mirror, the pieces scattered at my feet. Pieces of me corrupted to look smaller. Bigger. Incomplete. The corner of an ear here. A knee there. Lines crowing from the side of my eyes.

The mirror repairs. I peer into it, and where my face should be I see … a steaming bath, blur of a nose, fog that shifts so my eyes can’t rest, and an indistinct profile.

My past is there, but it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to memory and it refuses to release anything to a sensible interpretation. For I know making sense of it will make nonsense of me. And I panic, breathing harsh, pulse heavy, but I dig and dig; thoughts are my shovel, callouses grow, I work so long, and I hit … something.

I’m naked. Aroused. Scored through with shame. Frozen still, and yet in a fever of anxiety.

This is wrong. So very wrong.

I scream, but no one is listening.