Lost

I have to finish packing. This may be the last chance I can walk this neighborhood at night. I've lived here for a long time. The chart says I've moved from Dusseldorf to here in 1970 but I remember living in New York for a while as well. I'll have to ask him. It upsets me how much I have to ask him.

Every morning, I have a list but he loses patience, humiliates me before it is over.

I am forty-seven years old. He's a mere thirty-four. Old and new. Still, there's no depth to these years anymore. I feel as though I've been cheated of the richness of age, of the surety. He tells me things without texture: marriage, divorce, wife, job: these things turn to dust in his mouth: I am sure that they meant so much more to me.

Meaning lies in distortion.

He thinks my motor abilities have been affected as well. They haven't, yet I can't seem to get out of the way quick enough. When I see something coming towards me, I am lost, dazzled, as it were, by the chrome glinting off in patterns, the figure in the car: all these things paint themselves upon my retina and I simply stare, and I continue looking until I remember that my body isn't moving. My body's just standing there. It's amazing how much I used to do without thinking. Everything now requires so much thinking, so much reacting.



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