Timework

A full rotation is no small magic. Of late I find years begin to blur, the space between breaths attenuated. When I hear a snippet of a song trailing out of one of the radios from a passing automobile, or sometimes from one of the wiring mechanisms that accidentally picks up a signal and starts to sing (itself more than worthy of note, I think), it cues memory. That is, if I know it, and I rarely do, then I try to place that song in narrative. When was it the soundtrack to my life?

You speak of the hush of white and silence so loud that it becomes a whine, rising, aspiring to thunder and lightshow in the snowburst. I know it too. I have never been good at apprenticing myself to silence. It does not seem to be in me.

Are we us, Willard? Are we still who we were? Do we contain those selves? If those old skins heard song X and were induced to electrical state Y and we felt, what, aroused? weightless? explosive? somehow more alive, harboring such potential energy, do those selves still exist? Or are they retired, decomposed in the compost heap or in the cemetery or in the backlist of our brains?

Have I ever told you about the phenomenon of paradoxical undressing? That a body gets confused in blizzard conditions or when chilled sufficiently, that it starts to feel hot, that it strips layers off and discards them in the snow, that bodies are found on some mornings, especially those following the big snow storms, naked and frozen and buried, maybe a foot still sticking out, the ice crust on a face like a rite? That police are often fooled into thinking murder, molestation, at least at first?

The brain is so easily misdirected that it's hard to believe in I, in anything, in who we were or who we are. But then you step out in one of those moments that you describe and all those thoughts erase. It's so obvious, then, who you are, who you couldn't help but be.

Perhaps you already know it well.