Shopping, shopping: but the sizes keep being wrong. A bag is missing: where did I go yesterday, where could I have left it?
A shower to recover clarity, remembering the handsome young man who caught up to me in the mall yesterday to ask how was my dinner with friends last week – a sense that this friendliness will need to be enough, it is too late.
Bus ride into town, bags in each hand – and it all cracks apart as I realize I don’t have my keys, I don't have my wallet: I think, mini-strokes? Third forgetting in as few weeks. Strategies unfold across town: I could call him, or her, I see that without a wallet I can’t open some gates –
University, security guys kindly and cheerful, but I am anxious: this is happening too often. How would I know if my consciousness is deteriorating, if that 2009 stroke were recurring in tiny bits? Luck with combination, keys, door: home again, wallet and keys are indeed lying there, innocent…
But questions remain. Where is my attention? Calmer lately, a shift rooted in analysis: despite the security guy’s reassurance it is dubious to blame the usual complexes, preoccupations, even holidays. How could I know if awareness were becoming… intermittent? Can I work with patients, should I continue with plans and actions…
Settling down. Patient notes, vacuum, dinner. If the personal might be fracturing at the same time that the world is doing the same, perhaps… it doesn’t really matter.
In midwinter there is always falling into the warm snowdrift, the quiet dark of the year, into sleep and drifting clouds of dream.
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