From Scratch
Starting from scratch becomes part of the cycle for those with short memories. A ritual repeated so many times it feels as natural as the change of the season. The feeling of losing part of yourself each time remains and grows. A distance exists from where you are to where you were, but you are no longer sure where you were, or who you are and who you were. Memory bleeds into fiction, self-justification, or worse reality. Could these be dreams? Are dreams memories also? Have I become a self-fulfilling story or am I constantly moving the target? You take yourself back to places you once knew. Places you have only visited in your dreams for years, in twisted and disjointed lucid landscapes that make as much sense as a map drawn by Picaso. These places feel so small, like you step over all of it, nothing but a footnote. How far have you let this world stretch and push you? Was it the world or was it my own unnatural ambition, driven by invisible demons, persisted by the inability to stop, because how could you ever justify the horror of the self-inflicted damage to escape? Perhaps this is the measurement of how many times you have performed your ritual, that you no longer feel like the physical world you go back to find yourself in no longer seems real. One day, likely not too soon, will also only persist in my dreams, added to the whirlpool of my degenerating identity. My dreams blend the small pieces I still hold onto, and sometimes I don’t want to leave my dreams, because it is the only place I am myself again, back in a handful of small moments I am lucky to keep.