reading room
temporal diplopia
someone at the next table said your name
and the afternoon developed a minor ontological defect
not grief nothing sepulchral more like an obsolete webpage briefly resolving from static
immediately my internal monologue became unacceptably sesquipedalian
which, according to certain people, is evidence of arrogance
as though unusual language must always be theatrical as though articulation itself were a species of vanity
across from me someone continued speaking
i nodded at approximately the correct intervals
i have never understood why sincerity becomes suspicious the moment it grows precise
the mind retrieved with humiliating fidelity
the obliquity of your handwriting
the polymer-blue smell of second-school corridors after rain
the arrangement of shoulders i once mistook for personhood
the studied bass register i rehearsed into permanence
strange
how the nervous system retains entire behavioural climates
how a few syllables can reinstate obsolete coördinates
for several seconds i experienced a kind of temporal diplopia
this restaurant this decade this body
and another existence running fractionally beneath it like corrupted subtitle tracks on damaged media
someone across from me laughed at something
i realised too late that i had not heard the story
then the aberration passed
the table resumed its ordinary coördinates
porcelain contacted porcelain cutlery shifted softly someone asked if i was tired
and some earlier configuration of me persisted momentarily
as though authenticity itself were something people encounter only as performance when they have forgotten how to recognise it
— Lilith