Friday, July 15, 2011

The momentum of a moment

You know how glass shatters when it encounters a violence it has no hope of absorbing, how the shards twinkle when the surface erupts in horror as breaking point is reached, how they throw off a sudden confusion of coloured lights that is the trauma of becoming unwhole. It strikes from the darkness, this memory that is not mine but which hurls at my consciousness a force of emotion which must have been yours. It is a living source of hate which has accumulated only density and impermeability through the passage of years, a rock hardening under the weight of time, unable to forget itself into non-existence. It hurtles through the shadows and the the scenery of a past blackening in its wake, and it brings to the surface of my mind a force I cannot withstand. It breaches the back of the mirror with a momentum unchecked by your forgetfulness or my forgiveness, the brutal momentum of a moment that was yours and another's and not mine, and as I look into the mirror my reflection and the calm around me are thrown into motion, a thousand silvery shards throwing the face of my own fear back into my flesh. Perhaps the pain will drain itself out when the blood stops flowing. Perhaps I can wear my broken face into the happiness and the future we imagine. Perhaps not.

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