Colors and numbers. Numbers and letters. Letters and colors and sounds. Swirling and swirling and dropping him into an endless abyss.

Falling. Faster. Faster. Terminal velocity. What was that word? He didn’t remember. Terminal velocity. What did it mean? He didn’t know, but he thought it was the right word.

A shift. The world turned inside out. He was falling in another direction. The opposite direction. He was falling, earlier… what was earlier. What did “earlier” mean? It meant… before. Before an event. Earlier, he was falling down. He knew down. He was always going down, wherever he was in the world. There was [a ground holding him from going down all the way, but there was always something pushing him down.


So he knew down. What was the other direction? The one he was falling now? Up. He thought it was up. He thought it was falling. Or was it rising? He didn’t know. Why didn’t he know? He wanted to know. WHY DIDN’T HE KNOW!?

The falling stopped. He was still.

He saw a thing. It was like a misshapen lump of dough. He remembered dough. It was a lump of dough. But it had 2 little almond shaped things next to each other. And a bulging protrusion on the center of the dough oval. It had 2 holes in the bottom. Below it…

Wait. He wasn’t looking at dough. It was a face. He had a face. Everyone had a face. Of course.

He knew it was a face. Why did the face make him smile? Was it his face? Did he have a face? Yes. he remembered his face. It was young once. Young. Not old. Not wrinkled. His eyes worked. Both of them worked fine.

He was… not young now. He was the opposite of young. He was old. He was very old. Or was he very young? He felt old. Maybe that meant he was young.

Every few minutes? Or was it seconds? It could have been hours. Every few
minutes/seconds/hours, something came together. A coalescence. A coordination. The colors. The sounds. The numbers. The letters. A G K S H R O S G E I D I S I I S. What did they mean?

The colors came together more. It was another face. Face. the lump of dough. The dough that he had. The face. The face was not the same. Not the same as what? He didn’t know. He thought he remembered seeing a face a few minutes/hours/seconds ago. It was different. It wasn’t the same face.

The face grew! It grew! How did it grow? He never heard of growing faces.

It was a body. He remembered now. He had one. A person! A human! It was a person. Their lips were moving. Lips. What were they? They were lips. To a mouth. Why? He didn’t know. He stopped trying to figure it out.

The lips. The mouth. There were letters coming out of them. But the letters weren’t letters. They were Letters That Are Sound. How were the letters sound? The letters. They said something. Or read something?

DAD


What was dad? Dad. Dad. he said the word. He sounded it out in his mouth. He decided he liked it. Somehow, there was a voice that was not his echoing inside him. A small body. A child. A child said it. DAD. The body in front of him was not a child. But the sounds the letters from the person in front of him made sounded similar.

DAD

He was DAD. He knew. The colors coalesced and he knew he was DAD. And he knew what he called the person in front of him, and he wanted to say it.

So he said it.

The person’s lips moved. They stopped making sound-letters. They widened. They flattened. It was a smile.

He also smiled.