[YOUR NAME]: [stricken from record]
Very soon then I could hear no one and nothing else. Where every hour disappeared inside the idea of every life as last I felt it, it held no contour beyond what it had been. The itch it left was nothing more than air alone and unrepeated. I was allowed then in the absence to feel anything I wished, to remember anything I wished, without vocabulary.
And yet I loved the feeling of the disappearing. I wanted it to never cease. The slower I tried to make it go, the less there was left behind thereafter.
My final body rose from what we’d been. I was the last remaining person, alive beyond any memory, or now. I could feel my name inscribed the endless faces on the land of the bodies slain in layers carried in us all echoed as the gristle of today.
My skin was soft. I remembered nothing, which meant I could remember anything in any head, which means I did not have to remember to still feel it knitting in me, turning in against itself, as what I was. My arms resembled every arm, every inch bursting over with tattoos and wounds the flesh had eaten down into me, conformed intact with what I was. I could go on now forever in the instant despite all I’d done and what had been done before me, fearing nothing of the shift of blood and skin that formed the ground, the light shaking in marrow of the nature of my breathing, thinking, wanting, eating, laughing, each now no longer caving me with age.
I did not wear a ring. I could not remember what a ring was.
All remaining land was only sand — white sand forever shaken from the resin of our scalps and fingers, flesh torn apart; our bodies rendered at last no longer, unto powder, shimmered with all prayer, though you can no longer tell one body from another, from the ground itself. No matter which way I went or how far into it, the sand continued, all directions, over oceans, every forest.
I did not know why I walked. The heat of the dry scape burned my feet beneath me. I could feel the spaces in me where I’d had a friend once, a family, somewhere out here, like the light. The sand is what the sand is.
Nowhere else. I would find perhaps here or there among the plane of planning a jawbone or a locket, a strand of hair unmelted several feet deep, or a glove of glass, or some white shell. I pressed the objects to my face, heard nothing, and in placing them again against the ground would soon feel them lost in untraceable whiteness.
I could not remember why I’d ever went.
I knew I had forgotten where I’d been already and was walking the same surface many times repeated, seeing the same things new as nothing new.
I could not remember my name, the word for anything. I did not know how long time had been this way against me. I could tell no difference from any old day and the last. I heard nothing sing within me.
I stopped wherever I’d become.
I stopped and saw all light resembling the same.
The land was no one’s. Wherever I looked upon it, it opened on itself, into more of itself. There was more inside it than it even believed in, though it could do nothing with it now.
Anywhere in this expanse I stopped and stood and looked and felt no dream.
I could not remember where I’d come from or after who then.
I could hardly tell where I ended and sand began.
I did not know why there were no walls around me.
I made a marking in the sand. The marking allowed my mind a small relief, as once within it I could no longer remember anywhere but.
I knew the marking wore a door. Here the door was a preternatural idea and had no name beyond it simply leading to what would be the first room of the space, which I would build into a copy of the room where in my childhood I had sat on the floor with my hands before me and my mother behind my back, stroking my hair or humming or sewing or singing the song or silent in the night exhausted for the machines, the color of the TV shining low against our faces or the face of the books my mother planned to read aloud to me, bestowing its hidden crevices of nowhere upon the child I was already becoming in the machine of my brain alone.
As I imagined the door, then, it appeared there. It was a white door, like my memory, leading to anything.
The rest of what must be was up to me.
To form the lengths of walls surrounding what the door was, I searched for sharper relics among the sprawl of local sand: ribcages, skulls and tibia, phalanges and sockets, spines and collarbones. They no longer felt like parts of people. The bones hissed and puzzle-clicked into new configurations to form grids, and from them doorknobs, stairs. I packed sand into the shapes to make the surfaces opaque held spindly and dense and fell immediately away, leaving holes through which the air outside could continue in through, while the day went on around, basking in my brain a second color to the home where the air had not been before.
At some depths whole packets of new expanse appeared by nature worn into the innate definition of the space — an oven or a bathtub or a staircase — as if the house had always been beneath the sand there buried, waiting.
The ceiling I left open wide. The light of the house would be moons and suns, whatever weather, though it would never again rain here.
When I could do no more each day, I entered sleep. My absent dreamworld bristled around me overflowing every perimeter of what I couldn’t see completely overcome with everything not carried in me. Each instant just beneath the under of sleep’s nothing seized with a cream of flame around my mind, as if against its own image the whole house wanted to implode unseen, return to its elements. The ring I could not remember ever having not worn burned around my finger and fed off me; I couldn’t feel it, but I knew. There was in my head only the black, the long lengths of the house I’d built from death surrounding my life now.
Inside sleep, I walked along the walls in place of everywhere through which I’d come. I pantomimed actions already lived through, wanting only there to appear those who’d been there then returned beside. My hands moved without me moving. Where no one spoke inside the rooms of the house inside the dark the doors stood open, chamber to chamber.
“I am a hole,” I said aloud each time I touched a wall, but I could not hear it, allowing days to disappear between the words — hours haunted with the unheard words of vows of death, of forgiveness, the oldest colors.
Through days I bloated in my home like it was mine; I could see my fat moving before me into where I was before I felt me be there; this also hurt though in a smaller place and one I learned to think around; I was able to do this by focusing on the pages of a blank book that appeared inside my head when my eyes closed without my knowing; a book I knew had never been; each page was larger than your head and brighter than I could stand to look at; the book shook with what could have been written, in any book, all prior books not realizing they were disappearing into this one book as they were written, carried and carried on, in vast precision in the image of what it could not at all reflect, a silent murder rendered forward by something old and made eternal now in every inch of my face and the walls inside me. In this way days inside the house did not seem days; lives could pass among my head each day hidden in blinking; terror here might seem as easy as having dinner or lying faceup on a bed or holding the mental hand of someone I’d loved under a sky that seemed to need nothing but itself to carry on. The way it gathered in the book unbeing it gathered in me also, sealing its total brightness into every gesture, so that while awake I began to feel I weighed the weight of ten whole people in one body, each of them breathing and eating what I breathed and ate also, replicating.