The internet was down in the entire city today. No really, it was.

A fading as steady as a page over
twenty-six years, the word that was spoken
into you before you understood,
the incipient thing that assumed your form
and whose shape you first knew when you first took
in hand a pencil, tracing in desperate
strokes a handful of letters - they
became you - and soon growing accustomed
to grace endeared themselves to those who met
their meaning, though it slipped away from you,
the last part first on an afternoon in
a waiting room, people and their problems
lining the walls, and you at the window
mustering the remnant: every library
card, handwritten note and checkbook signed,
every schoolbook inscribed erased from muscle
and memory, so foreign to yourself you felt
you must become a patient under a
more practiced eye, to read you back into
being. And waiting, it turned out, was all
you could do. Those letters may have come
to you one day late, but by then you'd
forgotten you were trying to remember.