..that I'm starting to forget your face. Soon, the sound of your voice will follow suit into that empty corner of my brain. That threshold of no return. A reverberation, an electrical current. And then some inevitable death.
What's funny is that sometimes you do show up every now and then when I scroll through social media. I unblocked you some time ago when I thought I could stand you coming across my feed. I let go because I believed that was essential to me accepting, but you look so foreign. I don't know if my memory is lapsing, if you're using 10 different filters again, or if you've actually just grown. I can accept you having gone, just not looking so different from how I remember you. But I'm starting to forget (anyway) and I don't know if I'm at peace with that.
Maybe I have changed too. Frankly, I feel worn and slightly aged and I can't tell how long I've looked this way. I mostly can't tell because I've avoided staring at myself for too long. My skin has always felt like rubber. Touch has always felt so artificial. I don't want to linger on what feels.
What is the point of sense when everything feels so immaterial. Memories feel like dead pixels and it feels almost impossible to put together when your brain has deconstructed itself to forget. Forget and move on. I've forgotten why I hurt, just not the hurt. So I'm left like a broken monitor with half of its screen deteriorated with static buzzing. Brown coated dust on my shell, the scent you get from piled up appliances your parents keep in the attic; old and aged. Not totally discarded, not exactly alone ever since the tiny, hair-like spiders took shelter in you but it's not exactly un-silent either. It's that distant familiarity, that feeling of knowing you've forgotten.
There was something about this that used to matter to me.
Oh, I've forgotten a lot of good that I wish I hadn't. Maybe I'd have a larger pool of important data I can hold onto and keep forever. That these pixels don't feel so immaterial when I recall them. That they can feel more than bytes someday. Maybe I can reload the files from my "Old Minecraft Worlds" zip file and simulate us building that house for the first time. The years of terabytes I carry around like deadweight but cannot replicate.
I am that deadweight I carry and I will continue to be because I need to want to remember to say I've lived. That I existed more than a ghost on the internet, more than some internet persona, and maybe as something a little more than material.
