Memories of me are escaping, shattered into shards of mirrored glass and exploding out in a red mist of reflections and sharp edges and pulpy matter.

I am helpless to catch them all as my eyes search in a flurried desperation to recall my key moments in existence before they are all gone for good.

The things I used to love and the essence of myself leak out through opened veins where once they circulated, travelling round through a roadmap of my thoughts and always accommodatingly available to be pulled up into consciousness at any time of my choosing, but now no longer.

They all leave me, the faces of my past, the earliest of which I have long since forgotten along with those most recent whose names are still linked with the firmness of a handshake just past; they are all now faceless, anonymous – evicted from their adopted homes in my head where they were kept warm and always welcome regardless of my ability to ever identify them all via synthetic names and titles.

Separated too are the feelings I attached to these once detailed and multifaceted characters of one’s life story; not only are they now being erased in quick certainty of their very beings, but no longer do I either connect their avatars with even a hint of affection or disdain.

The mirrored shards shrink away until they are but specks in what was formerly the contents of my brain, now neutralised and reduced to but splatterings of bits and pieces of empty, useless, sponge.

The idea for this originated from a series of strange thoughts at 12.30am all about, and I acknowledge the oddity of this, what it would feel like when a bullet is about to enter your skull and suddenly you find that you’re in the midst of a cliché: your whole life flashing before your eyes. One would think that such a flashback would have to occur in quick haste before the brain is expunged from its rightful place: with smatterings of images and emotions being sent flying and tumbling out of one’s cranium in a million directions. However, ‘Lobotomy’ captures very much the same sentiments, really, and it sure sounds better than ‘Your life flashes before your eyes right before a bullet to the head’.