The memory of an echo, or an echo of a memory, white shadows written in shades of white on white, monochrome on monochrome, whispers whispering to each other and saying nothing, or else, something so profound as to be incomprehensible, something primordial, something as unseen as it was omnipresent, something as certain as it was unknowable.

Swimming? Or was it flying? The kind of controlled floating he sometimes encountered in dreams, dreams he suspected were dreams but proved otherwise, at least for a while, and then faded and fled and were stored once more in ethereally inaccessible memories. Or shadows of memories, or echoes of dreams stored confusingly among memories until one sort was indistinguishable from the other.

Answers on tips of tongues but the tongues, all too busy talking, couldn’t release them and the ensuing cacophony would have made them incomprehensible anyway. Had they in fact been uttered. Perhaps they had been. Shadows of answers, or perhaps echoes of answers, ephemeral echoes, but then, what had the questions been?

Perhaps the questions and answers had been divorced inchoate and thus had never existed in the first place, or if they’d existed, they’d drifted further and further away, perhaps back to “Neverland” or to the “Other Side of the Looking Glass”, or perhaps, merely beneath the very thin ice of a recently frozen lake, leaving what might have been fading afterimages had anyone thought to look. Had there been anyone there to look. Had there been anyone there at all.

Perhaps there had been but that person, assuming it was a person and not a recently birthed albino kitten or a baby black swan sundered from its bevy, but in any case, whether a person or a kitten or a swan, perhaps it had not thought to look down, too concerned with the possibility that the thin brittle ice might crack. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps not at all. Or perhaps there had just been an ethereal echo of a person or of a kitten or of a swan or of a shadow.

The memory of an echo, or an echo of a memory, white shadows written in shades of white on white, monochrome on monochrome, whispers whispering to each other and saying nothing, or else, something so profound as to be incomprehensible, something primordial, something as unseen as it was omnipresent, something as certain as it was unknowable.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.