You sit among the scratches on the leather chair reading philosophy, meditating on the gap between memory and anticipation, speaking about difference and the touch of yesterday.

 

Thoughts turn as questions linger, a pitchfork rolling the hay to prevent fire.

 

I wear a path in the kitchen, looping a five-step circle, a bag of chips beneath my arm, crumbs scattering across the barrier that separates the real from fiction.

 

My perceptions haunt, chimeras in the movement of light and shadow, snaking their way into the present.

 

I hear a sounding alarm, where once you bent on one knee and the salt water quenched the dry soil, the breath of your lips on my forehead.

 

You ask, have you taken your pills?