A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness...and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.

What truly remains of me Is that very thing- my absence.

Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.

... and what you are left with is a premonition of the way your life will fade behind you, like a book you have read too quickly, leaving a dwindling trail of images and emotions until all you can remember is a name.

All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

I felt loss at every hand. The
loss of self-esteem is a celebrated symptom, and my own sense of self
had all but disappeared, along with any self-reliance. This loss can
quickly degenerate into dependence, and from dependence into infantile
dread. One dreads the loss of all things, all people close and dear.
There is an acute fear of abandonment.

Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.

but as he plodded along a vague and almost hallucinatory pall hazed over his mind; he found himself at one point, with no notion of how it could be, a step from an almost certain fatal cliffside fall — falling humiliatingly and helplessly, he thought; on and on, with no one even to witness it. Here there existed no one to record his or anyone else's degradation, and any courage or pride which might manifest itself here at the end would go unmarked: the dead stones, the dust-stricken weeds dry and dying, perceived nothing, recollected nothing, about him or themselves.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That's it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know.
It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that—well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been—or, more precisely, being about to be—hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap—the crater—that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers.

Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.

The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on.