The Romantic Imagination

He approached as though detecting the morose quality to my gaze as I sat, curled in the wire chair. 

"here's this back, so you won't be lonely." The old man returned the chair to the cafe table I sat at. I smiled, motioning to the chair. 

"My companion." The small velcro pouch beside my laptop caught his eye. 

"what's that?" 

"This?" I pulled open the velcro, revealing the reflective cheap black plastic of my camcorder. 

"It's a camcorder." 

His family memebers spectated with the rapt concern of the more socially reserved generation, awaiting to see if their patriarch had upset the strange, darkly clothed figure that sat alone, nursing a latte along with a host of other issues. 

"oh my. So different from a few years ago...just a few years ago..." 

I saw the wistful film of contemplation gloss over his eyes. I nodded. 

"Have a nice day." I smiled warmly. The look he gave me depthened. 

"Take care, dear." 

I had missed witnessing the depths of something stirred within the eyes of a stranger. I wondered what he had seen of me. 

My fingers curled around the phone as I picked it up, the fingernails painted a slate, masoleum gray. My senses sharpened as I noticed the quality of my perception shift. I thought back to the essay I had written about the Romantic imagination and the romantic susceptibility to divine inspiration and evocative sensation. I realzied then it was the fourfold vision of my own personal mysticism that would save me. In my exile I had grown discontent, my spirit wilting. When would I be able to once more see the colors of the world when I so long remained away, bleached of anything vital like the brain I had seen, encapsulated in a glass slab in the laboratory. 

"I have an abstract question." 

I asked as I peered through the dissected slab of what had been someone's temportal lobe. I sat before it as though I could glean some sort of miasmic insight from any lingering thoughts that once occupied it. 

"What is it?" 

I pulled out my camcorder, zooming in on the nearby similarly bisected human heart, one that had once termored and clenched within the safety of someone's breast. My eyes watered. 

"If there were some theoretical..residue... or essence of a person left, which one of these would most likely house it? The brain, the heart, or the skull over there?" I indicated towarsd the human skull on the nearby lab table, a strip of wall tape across the brow. 'Gentle, I'm a real one.' I had let my fingers trail across the eye socket, gently across where the brow had been, imagining how it had furrowed in life with gentle contemplation. No psychometric impression arrived as I stared into the empty sockets of the remains. 

My friend contemplated the matter for a moment as I zoomed in on the webs of vascular tissue.

"I think...if there were anything left, the brain." I looked tenderly upon the mind before me, reduced to an organ, absent of living aspect. I adjusted the Frankenstein bolt choker I had ironically been wearing, finding a strange kinship with the various human specimens around the room, perhaps identifying with them as an extreme symbol of incompleteness, lacking vital aspect. Frankentstein's creature was a rapt allegory as I founnd my fingers lingering at the bolts bracketing my neck.