Somebody gave you a knife and stood back smiling as you cut away parts of yourself. Those aren't the right words. The right words lie red and dead around your feet. They try to come back in the sleeplessness of night, small and persistent through the tip of your tongue until you bite them down and taste their blood.
You work hard to keep not remembering. It would be harder to stop. There's a lot to not know; not a word or a dozen but a language and what the language describes. You can feel it all shifting on the other side of a dull aching glass, something good and desperate you miss. You cut away the word for longing with the thing you only have the word knife for.
You cut what hurts. You cut what doesn't. You no longer possess the grammar of intent. After an inexpressible time your language is just a single noun and a single verb. There's no word for stopping.
Something unutterable is still smiling.
(Originally posted on my blog.)