Image at the Edge of Memory

I stand at the boundary of my mind, the place marking a transition between conscious knowledge and subconscious belief. Frightening are the mind’s thin places, the boundaries where exterior facades fail and the true self emerges. The point at which memories become myths, thoughts lose their certainty, and images are incoherent. Within this clarity of confusion I see it, a fragment—disconnected and frozen from my conscious mind. An image at the edge of memory.

Confused and bewildered, I’m thrust into an unsettling realm of discovery and reflection that continually threatens to overwhelm the fragile persona constructed upon cliché sentiments and social platitudes. Its presence came to me in something like a dream. A flash of time of what was, within the missing moments of stray experience. Memories lost, memories found, a sight of long ago, buried in layers upon layers of unwittingly purged memories.

Before the depths of my own psyche, at a dark place long ago forgotten, I remember this something from a somewhere birthed from the nowhere spaces of the subliminal. Why does this image torment me? Why didn’t this image fade away as the other countless snapshots of time? This image, buried by mounds of forgetfulness, reminds me of the untrustworthiness of memory.

Unnerving are the images fragmented from our historical narratives. The ones we comfort ourselves with and use to make our fleeting time make sense. It only takes one, an ephemeral glance of that which doesn’t belong, to upset those carefully constructed memories of the self. Old memories haunt and provoke feelings that we wish remain dormant and inaccessible. The deeper parts of the self, images at the edge, spook the psyche. Everywhere ghosts lurk, ghosts of the past and ghosts of the present. Specters of the self emerge at the fringes, eager to find a forgotten treasure no one wants, a lost trinket no one desires, a place no one visits. On the edges of memory such ghosts find the things never meant to be found.

Thus, the image before me, drudged from the depths of my own mind, frightens me as the thing that doesn’t belong, the thing that doesn’t fit, the thing that shouldn’t exist. And yet, here it is. Its existence reminds me of the hidden parts lost within me and the aspects of the soul that lurk in places where thoughts seldom dwell. Where no sensible person goes. Where logic breaks apart. Oh, that one should be so lucky as to not dwell at the boundary for more than a moment!

Photo by Jakub Kriz on Unsplash