It was a pretty chilled night out in the city, just my wife and I. We went for dinner and then walked a while through the city, which is something we used to do quite often when we lived there many years ago - but it felt like it has been forever.
Everything feels like it take ages now - for my mind still feels disconnected from my body, somewhat dreamlike, as if I am experiencing the world in someone else's body, and there is variable lag. A room illuminated by a flickering light, only to be consumed by the darkness as it continually fails to hold charge.
In some ways, life has become fractured and disorienting, refractions mirroring of the facets of a glass, pushing back on each other, replacing each other until the truth of origin is no longer known. It is an alien feeling to be unfamiliar to oneself. To walk streets walked a thousand times only to come to places never before known.
My wife no longer knows who I am, or what I have become, only what I was. Like she, I do not know what has been locked away, the key lost - or is it that the key was turned and what was hidden away has been unlocked. It is impossible for me to know whether it is loss or gain I have suffered. If I have been found or the intermittence of the flickering light will become further apart and the periods of dark longer, until gone, extinguished.
All those sweet dreams of life, the promise of magic, the lies told to those who are yet to see what the truth. It can be sugar coated, but chaos rules, not destiny. The order we feel is an illusion and the veil can be removed at any moment, reality snapping with high definition clarity into view, undeniable, even as we look away.
Time is no longer ticking to the same beat, no longer methodical or predictable. The world swirls with speed and out of grasp, yet moments move so slowly that by the time one registers in the mind, the mind has already become bored and turned toward the next.
A night out, a year away. An eternity to return.