Like a time-lapse view of a melting ice cube,
or the erasure of a blackboard equation, he
disappeared from his face. All the features
remained: a head, a nose, eyes, mouth.
What melted away right at that moment
was who he was. Once a familiar relative—
now a total stranger. A being without
a story, zero associations, nameless.
She marveled at the fluidity of her
perception. The building blocks and
scaffolding of the mind just tenuous
threads, gossamer filaments.
The brain as cotton candy.
Where others may have panicked,
raced to gather all the vanished
referents of this person, she floated
calmly in the buoyant waters of
the impersonal. She only resisted
when the reel began to play in reverse
and—feature-by-feature—this
family member re-inhabited the
body sitting across the room
from her and she could only try
in vain to forget again.
