It starts with small things. Those things closest to the surface floating like debris in your mind; floating as though your mind were a vast ocean of thought and memory and that ocean is becoming unknowable. It starts by reaching for a name. You see it. The name lingers just out of reach and you cannot remember. You’re a decent researcher though, aren’t you? You can remember some of the things the artist did and you find the name that way. This works for a while–you reshaping habits to fish out these lost memories of things that don’t truly matter because you are afraid you’ll lose the things that truly do matter.
But you have lost those things. The worst part is you don’t even know you lost them.
You learn of the loss in the moments of closeness with your partner that grow ever more rare. She tells you about a thing you did together, hoping to share in the memory of the moment, but for you the moment is a mystery and that other moment–the ephemeral space of you and her together lost in time–shrinks. You are not you so much anymore. You are not the you she loved so deeply. You are not the you that was once in love with himself. You are adrift, lost in this unknowable ocean of chaos and unsure what to do with any of it.
It starts with small things; lost memories, micro-agressions, moments of sadness that seep into your daily functioning. All of these things add up until a life that is begins to fall into a life that was and the people around you grow spikes and dark faces.
It starts with small things, but how does it end?