I remember, I think. I think of the word, remember; to place together the dismembered parts.

That morning, the damp weight of an english basement held me to the mattress. Pressed along my back, inert buttocks and legs, the sponge drew me toward the earth and I realized it had been six months. I looked to the phlegm light, blue and muted sparkle, white-yellow lumens and an intermittent crackling coming from the pronged wall. I couldn’t move. The words were no longer helping. Get up, I’d hear. Get to work, the refrain. And then this morning, my eyes glittering quietly and unseen in mostly brown darkness, nothing; silence, air that voided. I expected the phrases to storm in the brain, but I was met with pure looking. It was the state the yogis trained to attain and maintain. It was a mind without thought and only body. But it was unwelcome, a sort of directionlessness. Though, not exactly that. Not exactly. When a person leaves their bed, and on sure-footed cement slabs, they are guided by an interior directing force. I couldn’t, that morning, hold those dismembered parts together, and the whole thing was rendered inert, like a computer broken open for its copper, like seeing spare car parts at a yard sale on white, washed and dried summer linens. It seemed I’d lost the ability even to muster the language programming that told them to play along together, to get with the program, to hold fast, boys. It was as if I couldn’t remember myself in each moment. I couldn’t anticipate where my hand would go, where my trapezius should be, or how long I might allow my right eye to watch the house’s foundational beam. The fireplace was equally mute, albeit a thumbprint of propane hardly threatening to lick the glass. The altar I’d assembled couldn’t make out my position from its higher perch; the digitally-rendered glimpse of Ruby in black and white, grandmother, thin features like the actress who played the witch of Oz; my mother fading in white pearls and red-rhubard done up hair, her legs crossed in her sitting chair, retro tabletop and an age that preceded my present; my father, dressed in handsome military uniform, a knowable gleam on his skin and his eyes, but I’d never known him. I wondered at their distance from me, their memory on printed paper, I wondered at their legacies. How can I remember myself? The only thoughts were questions. How will I? Why can’t I? What…

The questions turned to silence; just vision, again and the awareness of breath. I searched the familiar corners of the pale walls, where small spiders dropped their refuse in black-brown flecks. I heard “I’m here” as “am I here?”; the prompts canceling the other, the way the basement’s dense air held onto clothes and fabric; sticky, combative, useless. I felt my body as only weight, without time. I sat up, and the vantage remained. I was only eyes. Just witness. The yogis were jealous that I was in hell. I was upset I was no longer called by the world. The next day, I opened my eyes, and I was still only eyes.