The Disappearing

Sometimes it gets too hard to hold onto the world. Things lose their shape, become indistinct and their edges fade away. Sometimes whole areas of this world disappear. I have lost houses, streets, villages and even towns and cities sometimes. All just disappearing and leaving no trace. Sometimes the buildings disappear, leaving just roads that snake off into the distance leading from nowhere to nowhere. Sometimes the roads disappear too and leave just a landscape of emptiness that contains nothing but grass, trees and scrub right up to the horizon and beyond.

There are times too when the landscape itself disappears, leaving nothing, nothing at all. It is hard to describe the nothing that is left behind, because when we try to think of nothing we have to have something there that we can call nothing.

On the days, though, that everything disappears there is not even an absence – there is just nothing.

People disappear far too easily, as though they have stepped into another room. They are there and then – suddenly - they are gone. If they don't come back, then maybe I forget them. I don't know... I can't remember.

The other day there was a mirror – at least for a while – I looked into it and there was nothing there to stare back at me, just the reflection of the far wall and the painting that hangs there of some deserted empty landscape.

Then that was gone too.