Chasing Shadows

Endless dots of light fill a black sky.  
I'm in the car, my arm on the window.  
This soft breeze caresses me as endless flat planes sweep by me.  
A sigh carries on the wind; its words a spell that conjures forth dreams from the nebulous mists of the past.

Somewhere in those mists, you wait for me, not as a viper, but as a kind and gentle pain I would smother myself with, if I could.  
I don't even know how to drive, but I'm driving westward, away from it all on this quiet road.  
The guitar strings play their soft song of sorrow through the radio.

I've never been a traveler; I never sought the road to take me away.  
But when the wind whispers just the right, arcane word, I take off before the next time my heart beats.  
I've never known if I'm on this road to escape everything that threatens to swallow me whole,  
Or whether I am driving in all haste, with all speed, with reckless abandon for the one thing that I wish would never spit me out again.

Somewhere in those mists is you—a static, crackling image on an old television, gasping for its next breath.  
"But you must, you must, one more time," I always demand of it,  
Just to see the outline of your smile one more time in the static,  
Just to remember the lines of your hair from the black picture that is all I have left of you.

I lost the sound of your voice a long time ago.  
All I have left is the echo of whispered words, as if they had left imprints in the sandstone walls that make up the depths of my mind.  
Their gentle passing through those depths would have gone unmarked,  
But for my cramped mind trying to retain some scrap of the impossible ethereal.

Now the television in the seat beside me is barely a few grey and white lines among the blackness of its near-death.  
And I barely pay attention to the road while my mind wanders from picture to forgotten sound,  
Trying to make whole a picture that started rotting away the day I took it.

I won't crash.  
Whether fate, or capricious divinity, or infinite nothing look on,  
Whether they do so with pity or joy or morose indifference,  
I won't crash, because it would be too simple.

I'll just keep driving, running from and towards the same thing,  
Caught in that wonderful limbo where the shadow you once were is my only companion.  
I don't want to forget.  
But good lord, I wish I couldn't remember.