I'm Sorry, I'm Starting to Forget

AnonymousSome of us left people and relationships behind to pursue our dreams in Peace Corps. We are now a year or two years into service; for some of us, those people are farther away than ever and, for one reason or another, will never be as close as they were before.Before waking this morning,my psychology —wholly enmeshed in the whim-dream of REM sleep —sputtered and choked,as it failed to complete an image of your face,the pretty lines of whicheluded me last nighttetherless as specks of dust in a windstormscattering cerebral pixelseverywhereso that I could not piece togetherthe seemly symmetry of your round noseor recreate the way your eyebrowsawned the wrinkled cornersof your dark eyes,which never wandered,never searched for something else thatI cannot rememberhow your immutable smiledimpled brackets into your face,your proclivity for joy lendingits happy punctuationto your cheeks —these the jigsaw puzzle piecesthat my mind has before clambered to gatherlike it did last night,some nine months sinceI saw you last at TSA.For a time,looking at your face was always betterthan dreaming of itthrough clouded, months-old dream gogglesand always sweeterthan my futile attemptsat bypassing the synaptic trafficin my brain’s neural highwaysleading to a three-second-or-less snapshotframe of youbut today —though pained to say —I’m averse tothe likeness of yousince you punchedthose final words for meinto the body of an email,into my body,I can’t be your friend plungingpast my embrittled sternuminto my dried-up left chest,and now a decade of images of your faceseethe from the woundand sear my skin,carving out a gray cavitylike a grave to burythe gravity of an already-lingering thought —that our stories will be authoredwithin the bindings of bookswith different titles and differentendings and differentfaces.But this is old newsto my maimed psychology,which suddenly yearns for subtraction,grappling with the sadmechanisms of erasure,your facethe object of expensein the memory bankof a boy who sorely scrapesa pink rubber rhombusacross every recto and versoof a 1,000-page bookon the history of your facenext tomy face,now arched over a borrowed wooden desk,perfects the art of forgetting,while a lick of smokefrom a newly extinguished candleflicks my chinuntil my eyes meet thoseof a wall-framed King Rama IX,whose tired eyelids seem to droopthe way mine used towhen I wantedto dream of your facewhich tonight, like last night,my brain will stop me from doingby cutting more holesin the waning image of your face,but tonight,and every night after this,I will rememberto forgetto fill in the gaps.