In Retrospect, I Can't Remember.

I don't know why I'm here. I don't know if this is my home. And if it isn't, I don't know how to find the place that is.

I'm immersed in a sound that's like sand sifting through the waist of an hourglass. But grains of sand aren't making the sound; innumerable blades of dry grass are, dancing in gusts of tepid wind. In this flat meadow, this vast emptiness with no hills or trees or anything to help me keep track of where I've been, I am alone in a pool of white noise.

There's color here. Touches of tan in the dust that's accumulated between my bare toes. Tawny undertones mottled with emerald in the meadow grass. But they are muted hues, colors that might've been vibrant decades ago but are now merely bleached skeletons of their former selves. Probably this place was beautiful once. Now, it's only a barren desert that's weary of its own existence, a pale wrist drained of every last drop of blood.

My thoughts are as drab as the grass. I long for something meaningful to think about as I walk, but my mind is encompassed by the depressed flatness this place exudes. Occasionally I find myself on the brink of discovering something that might be important, but just before I snag the memory, it flickers away.

The sky here is lavender. I wish I could describe it as being purple, but that would be inaccurate. Too anemic to be vibrant, it's just another browbeaten element of this place that's too frightened by its own existence to be anything other than mediocre. It is always precisely the same shade. No matter how long I watch it, it remains monotone.

I walk. In the soft white dress I wear, drifting in and out of the waves of grass, I am sometimes angry and sometimes sad and always lonesome. I used to sing just to hear my own voice, but I stopped doing that a long time ago. There's enough emptiness here to stifle any sounds I make. Surrounded by unrelenting sameness, I am the one element that's out of place.

I'm barely aware of my own appearance. My hands and feet are thin; there are sunken spaces between my ribs. Other than that, I'm clueless. I wish I could see my face, but I'm afraid to at the same time. What if I saw the same bloodlessness I see in the field? What if my lips were chalky and my eyes were grey and my hair was transparent? What if I looked into my own eyes and saw nothing that I recognized?

I'm a wanderer. I never cease wandering; I only continue to drift beneath the lackluster sky. I don't know why I don't stop. Probably I'm entertaining a feebleminded notion that there might be something I should be seeing and I just haven't been looking in the right way to do so. I continue to search for memories and only come up with meaningless strings of words that have meanings I can't decipher. They say things like "the brakes have given out" or "will she ever wake up."

The words linger until they're gone. I wander on.