I know I should allow the air current to push you and me, the smoke, the dust motes forward but I have an uncompromising urge to write down the word ‘lacunae’ on this page—with ink. Once an urge like this takes over it’s impossible to put aside. I wish I’d used it in my previous entry to describe all the missing words, all I hadn’t written, all I remember so vividly yet what couldn’t live in those early bloated pages of my diary. 1 Plus I like how both the singular ‘lacuna’ and the plural ‘lacunae’ sound like a strong wind through an empty, windowless house. And how its meaning is pliant, easy going, often forgivably misused as a lapse in memory instead of its correct meaning—a part of a manuscript gone missing. So with this word’s forgiveness whenever it cartwheels across my consciousness like a dry leaf blown through a windowless house it reminds me of my father’s apology: I’m sorry, he said, I didn’t think you’d remember. He was partially right—I didn’t remember all of it. He understood how before and during and after a temporal lobe seizure (except for a few seconds of stuttering awareness here and there) memories would go missing. What he didn’t know or maybe didn’t want to acknowledge or maybe enjoyed was there were times an extreme stressor didn’t induce a seizure.
And so now it is finished. I’ve used the word. It has let me go. We can move on.2
Read the Temple Dream Parts l through lll for a better understanding of what is going on.