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It is not so much sudden as sad when memory discharges certain faces like misshapen quarters from a pay phone. A soft blank is left behind, a divot smooth-rounded. Pale glue loosens, whose job was never to make memory stay, but to hold it just so, for an unknown while.

Words seek permission to live in a house they can't build. Memory crafts the careful picture that holds remembered words inside, made from the stuff of the words.

Vision asks nothing. It enters and bathes memory, douses everything with liquid and color from which other textures rise and remain when the wash slides off, dries up.

With the passing of time, what was once read or heard exists in memory only in pastel light, the word-house now known through slit eyes, hollowsoft. And what was once seen is now even more residual, a fizz of bare air, faintly pressed with uncolor and unshape into a ghost the size of a meadow.

fell on 2004-04-21 at 8:55 a.m.

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