!ATTENTION!

attrac<---->tion

.e.c.t.i.o.n.

.m.i.s.

.d.i.r.

distraction (don't click it)

You are the illusionist. By chance or by choice, true calling or pure coincidence you are the one I catch in the corner of my eye. Always just a vague, vestigial afterimage left in my memory as you disappear seconds before what is commonly referred to as 'the reveal'. Vanished, like that dark, cloaked magician in misty white smoke at the end of the act. I yell your name but my own ears do not hear. My mind registers a very loud sound being produced in the form of a name; the reverberation shakes around in my head echoing like a scream down a cobblestone and concrete underpass. The contents of the sound are empty, as though your name were never contained within it. I struggle to remember as if I had actually heard it. As if someone just told me their friend's name and they turn their back, I immediately forget what it was, leaving me with a familiar face and a maddening inability to conjure their name. Only this time I have neither your name nor your face, just strange, cryptic memories of unknown origin, as though they were passed to me in a dream...

The dream changes shape and form in every way possible and each time is different. At the dinner table. Driving. Having sex. Walking around some unknown city, thousands of years ago. At a bar with friends. A mild day in October. Watching tv on the couch. The one constant through all of the variables in each setting is that the person is somehow familiar to me. I can sense them as if you were walking with someone and just happened to not be looking in their direction but you knew they were still beside you on your arm. You could feel them there. Each time I turn to look I can only sense and get a feeling of a person, a rough outline that is nondescript, with no defining features and nothing distinctive at all. It’s almost as though I were walking with a half-embodied ghost.

I do know who this person is, I remember. Yet, I don't.