Joos de Momper: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (circa 1620s)
" … as if Icarus had managed to fly around rather than a tad too close to the sun."

I feel as though I've flown a tad too close to the sun. Rather than tumble out of the sky like Icarus, though, I'm tumbling down through ether, imaginary space but always real enough before now. How would it be if one day you discovered that you could no longer access your intuition? No dumber than you ever were, but apparently lacking an essential connection that always reliably animated your processing before. Until then. You'd probably wonder if you'd ever recover that modest superpower again. Mine left under the influence of a certain prescription, one of those, increasingly common, which fiddles with Synapsing to fool some sense into changing. I suppose the drug's designer believed that it was just a switch, turned on or off, permanent effects unlikely. Fewer than .1% ever experience bradyphrenia, a "moderate" cognitive impairment, and I might or might not be experiencing it now. I just know that something's different. I can't even think crooked. Writing this small paragraph has taken several hours and not a second of that time seemed like writing.

I'm uncertain what to do. I feel compelled to try to continue writing, just as I suppose old Icarus continued flapping his melting wings all the way down, with his dad Darius watching horrified. I pray that one day, that eleventh sense most prominent in its absence consents to return. Until then, I'm distracting myself, worried sick but trying hard to not make myself a spectacle because of it. I'll hunker a while and hope for better. On the positive side of the ledger, I've been nicotine free for a full fortnight now and ten days past the last of that creepy medication. What usually happens is I send a complaint up into the heavens and in a day or two the difficulty resolves itself, as if Icarus had managed to fly around rather than a tad too close to the sun.

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