The New Knowledge

Early September, days are getting shorter and evenings longer; the breeze that blew had pockets of cold air, a reminder of things to come. Dawn when I got up looked into the mirror and saw my father’s aged face. Lucid now and for once fully conscious I had been asleep for forty years and lost the time between youth and old age. In a foreign country and I could no longer remember how I got here, or how to leave. I pressed fingers to my cheeks, in quiet despair, finger marks on inelastic skin that only slowly faded. Father, why did you let me sleep so long, how can I now recapture my adult years? A rumbling through the house, a picture in the living room fell off the wall; it was of my mother and she looked so young. The intensity of my reawaken consciousness overwhelmed me, walls fell and naked I stood in the ruins of my unlived life