Out of the Nowhere

I was distracted and could no longer recall the thought that had just occupied my mind. There was only the pleasant afterglow of whatever it was, a sweet residue lingering in the place where the thought used to be. I was annoyed that I'd let it go. Most of our identity, our past, is like this, a vast ocean of formless haze floating between small islands of what's remembered. Sometimes, that haze is toxic, sweeping in from an unnamed place with it poisons deposited by an event long erased of detail. Others come in gently as a feeling that settles like perfume, driftings from a contented moment of love set free of time and place, an escapee from memory. It can be electric. Who we are seems mostly hidden in that vague region where the aura and lint of our lives accumulate, too ethereal for memory to hold captive and replay in the now, no more than mere notions arising out of the nowhere from where we come.