you forget to continue. The spoon perched inches from your lips and you forget, you hold steady but you forget and remain still. A still life, still passing for what’s called living. You then hear a truck blare its horn outside your window, or the clatter of garbage cans, a cat in the alley screaming for children. You stutter and focus your eyes. There’s the spoon full of mush, you bring it that much closer, clamp your lips around it. It’s gotten cold sometime between picking it up and swallowing.
All days come to this and for some sooner than others. I want oblivion, this bliss of absence, of forgetting of place, identity, of disappearing into the walls. I want to disappear. I do not want to grow old. I look at my daughter and although the fear is still there, I reminisce more often. I think of my childhood, more specifically my teenage years. I try to trace where I faltered, where I stopped being a successful student and let myself go to waste. I sometimes try to delineate that, but most of the time I am trying to remember for when she comes of the same age so that I might better understand her. She’s barely ten months old and already thinking of her teens.
You pull the spoon away from her mouth, gently caress the underside of her chin. Even after all these years, her skin is so soft, so pale. She slowly chews, eyes out the window at an indiscriminate point in our past maybe? When we were young and fought and loved passionately? Before we ended here wiping each other’s ass when it occurred for us to do so, when the stink provoked the shame out of us. We’ve turned into sacks of flesh that have forgotten who we were to one another, what the world meant with us in it.