the way home
Visual agnosia is a neurological disorder characterized by the inability to recognize familiar objects.
you always had trouble separating the spheres of what you saw and
what you knew. your eyes, not really spheres but distended ovals, saw the world as a
blank page, placidly waiting for you to impart your truth. setting off at a run, you
scribbled ‘subjective' on every surface, leaves of trees, overturned rocks, bubbles not yet risen to the surface.
your singular interpretation appeared even on the lips and on the bodies of your lovers, their whole
frames trembling with your words, reveling in the heat from your eyes.
truth became ‘objective' when you could no longer see the breasts of your lover
as the weighty circles that they were. a leg, perhaps, a wisp of hair, the shape of her
waist, but never all as one. she became like picasso's women: broken,
skewed, apart. you could not process the entirety, only recognize her in bits, in pieces.
you knew the reality, but could only see your own version. shocked, your hands went
to your eyes, the circles betraying you, ice beginning to hang from
their corners, the corners in your bedroom no longer joining
to form a space that you recognized.
she, in the eye of your storm, began to spin farther and farther away. you knew where she was,
but could not
extend past the periphery to touch her. anguished, craving, clawing at definition, you went to
doctors, dictionaries, hospitals, in hopes that they could bestow clarity. they could not. there was
no cure. you left the clinic with frozen eyes
and an infinite knowledge of the steps leading round your circle. stumbling, widened, each street
curved into another way, another way, another way home, none of them leading back to her,
back to the straight, the narrow, the winding sweaty pathway to your door.
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