It was right there, almost legible to his mind’s eye. He could faintly remember how the clauses slotted together and on top of each other, and the harmony the sentence structure would have sounded, but the words themselves had disappeared into that accursed void, the great mist, amnesic mother of maddening mystery. Another stone in the graveyard of ideas forgotten before they reached manifestation, more tears to be unable to cry in spite of the grief and sorrow which was inseparable from the collective human heart. Perhaps that was why he couldn’t cry them — they weren’t his, and if they were they would be a task suited to a whole population, not one human person.
It had been the sort of opening line that pulls the first punch no later than the bell starts the round. No unarousing word within the first few to possibly allow one to go in search of a more attractive form of distraction. An emotional chokehold from the get-go, using lesser-known-and-combined words to get the heart in lock.
Every idea he had ever lost to laziness or lack of resources, every kernel of eureka from that event of inspiration remained, though the substance of the ideas was gone, leaving only a maddening sense of positive potential divorced from its actual seeds. It was purely an unjustified optimism which was not truly optimism for it inverted into scything cynicism in the absence of the idea’s substance, hanging its fallacious smile upon the fruits of deceased trees.
The feeling of possibility from each idea remained, amassed into one ghost, a tormentor…
