thick red dominos.

I called out to you, “Hey, Gareth.” And you said your name wasn’t Gareth. I said sorry and that probably I had forgotten your name. You were not upset. I didn’t think you were, in any case. At the time we still put on heavy coats when we left the house.
*
Later—quite some time after I had forgotten your name—I found ourselves playing dominos one evening, in the living room, on the thick red Persian rug. I think you were winning and said to me, “Do you know where we are?” I nodded ‘yes,’ and added a tile to the branch, the side joining had two dots, the other was blank.
*
I had already stopped talking by then, to you or to anyone. Yet I still retain snapshots in my mind of hardwood tabletops, of discarded colourful plastic yogurt pots and some of the things you used for work and I no longer cared to put a name to. But your music still made me feel afloat.
*
Soon after we stopped playing. Images turned intermittent and sound was often split from what I was seeing. My mind kept blabbering, though, a welcome diversion. Excuses invented for mischief unrecorded but nonetheless plausible. Pseudo-random splinters of consciousness triggered by no particular externality. Or so I heard you say.