Knew But Somehow Lost

by Amy Guth

He was someone she knew but somehow lost into the ether, long before she knew much about anything beyond blinking her eyelids and watching the world. She, in the colloquial super-ego sense of she wasn't she who knew, as the she who knew him was something larger and greater, reminiscent of deserts and ancient bricks, inviolable places and tiny gold lettered words of partition hidden on grains of spelt and wheat that fought their way to the light of day without knowing quite why they should. The she that knew him knew they were pieces of something wild, sacred and collective and veiled in Phoenician ghosts dyed from forgotten sources, invisible swirls furtively passing aching chests. These parts of being were splintered from opposite sides of a great cleave and lived aching too secretly, too mournfully of their separation all this time to even bother with the primitive electrical firing range of the brain's abilities. She and he were a halved metamorphosis, pieces wandering shiftlessly from consciousness to consciousness, life to life, until they opted, fought and unwittingly steered themselves into events and tracks and plans to brush past one other, feeling a strange quiet as eyes of dead ancestors smiled and danced a strange, slow macabre dance around them, as the two stepped back and looked at strangely familiar eyes and saw how together they'd always been, long before these paths ever crossed. Someone she knew but somehow lost.

6S - C1

Amy Guth, author of At Sevens, has written about blaxploitation, Judaism, feminism, media literacy, bandwagonism, art, cult films, racism, hate crime and social irritants for all sorts of places like The Believer, Monkeybicycle, blah blah blah. She's toodling around at the moment promoting her novel Three Fallen Women and having a very nice time, thanks. She blogs Bigmouth Indeed Strikes Again. Come say hi.