A vain, foolish or incongruous fancy, or creature of the imagination, as, the chimera of an author. - Webster 1913
These remembrances - was he dreaming? Did they really happen? He felt oddly dislocated. It was as if his world had shifted quietly and almost imperceptibly, as if everything had shifted left or perhaps right, just like that. He could tell. Could they?
He walked among them, but he was not of them. Could they sense his confusion? He searched for any sense of bewilderment on their faces, but there was none. Their lives and thoughts were connected, seamlessly connected, causality moving A through B with no nanosecond discontinuity. They moved through his landscape like Giacometti stick figures.
He thought he'd lived a different life for just a few moments, but those few moments were really days, weeks. He could remember the essense of those days, as if he'd really lived them. But the memories were fading fast. Only a vague ache remained.
It was important to remember where that ache came from. Was it a longing? Was it... was it something he'd promised? Something promised him? It was important, important! Wasn't it? He couldn't be sure. He thought he was sure, but he wasn't. It was, it was as if it had never happened.
What day was it? What month was it? Was it long ago? Or was it yesterday? He couldn't remember. He couldn't be sure.
He smelled his shirt. Did he detect someone else's odor there, right on the edge of detectability? It was so faint, it might have been a trick of the mind. He supposed it was someone else's scent. Had the Other worn this shirt? When? Yesterday? Weeks ago? Why would that other person have been wearing this shirt? Or was the smell from someone he'd touched, held? A woman? Was it a woman? He wasn't sure.
Echoes of feelings. Faint remembrances of strong emotions, receding into time, doppler-like, growing both fainter and lower. The sustained music in the grand stone cathedral after the mighty organ had stopped its final chord, the organist's hands over the keys, finished, all but the reverb. He looked this way, that, as if the act of looking in a certain direction would trigger the assocation. What? What was it? Nothing. Nothing.
Was this blankness a warning? Had he told himself: this is dangerous territory? Do not think back on these memories. Unpleasant? The closed door... did he dare open it? So many deathlike wraiths behind closed doors. Or was it a warning about sadness? Was something good behind those doors? Was it better that he'd forgotten how happy he'd been? Was this the room of joy and contentment? Did this room contain that missing keyhole filling person whose soul he ached for constantly? Was it better to bear the anonymous ache rather than give it a name, a face, a place, a time, a smell, a touch?
He wasn't sure. He couldn't think. The scattered thoughts enveloped him like a deep grayzone fog. He couldn't see, he couldn't hear. He was at the center of a Yves Tanguy picture, where nothing made sense but loneliness was palpable.
What had happened here?
The lost and lonely sands stretch far away. -
Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley