In the past year, I have experienced a thing called Palinopsia to a symbolic extreme.

My visions of people have staggered, I imagine them in brightness with light trailing behind them, streams in my eyes. I imagine life moving like a carousel. Colors trailing behind those horses. (The way the color of children's laughter changes when you've stopped being one, when you've had one, and when you've lost one.)

I could see all life in motion in the light trails of my visions.

And this vision I had (?) was all that I could grasp onto to define any image of myself. I convinced myself I was and could be beautiful when drunk off of those spinning high horses and their following pursuit of life in memory.

When I was young, I would lurk in corridors, becoming only a set of eyes and pair of ears. I crept in silence, and my senses bled light in the dissonance of my action and inaction.

In following years, I would walk through symbols, I longed for meaning in extreme isolation, I longed for shape to define shadow and light, I longed to define the shape of myself when my vision abstracted my own form. I was a mile away from all the things that people turn to when hiding from oblivion; couches, screens, substances.

So instead, I found another maladaption; I wrapped myself in garland, in artifacts of pagans and queens and seers. I imagined my thoughts to be running water over ice, covering deep sea secrets that surged under my skin. (It had to be water, so that when I decayed, I would still return towards the eternal source).

This past year, emptiness drew a circle in chalk around me, and I blindly submitted by digging the hole with bare hands. In this year of night walks, megalomania, and light trails, I realized I am not who I thought I was. I do not have the ability to cope with losing someone who sees me.

So lately lights have overwhelmed me, and I can't stand fluorescence. I imagine that when I die, I will see every single light I have ever seen; I imagine I will see every light from the eyes of every single person I have been and every single person I have longed to be.

I imagine that all of this will happen before the blinking lights wink at you again. And as for me, I will be in every single wave; my soul drawn-and-quartered across the spectrum of light.