Old Habits

This morning, as I was getting out of my car, absentmindedly thinking about the dream I had and wondering if my subconscious is trying to just plainly tell me that I’m bad in bed, I reached down to push in the knob to turn my headlights off.

I have not owned a car that had headlights like that since I was seventeen. But I still floundered, confused, this morning when my hand didn’t find purchase on that knob. And then spent a moment being confused about just what the fuck my hand was doing.

I sometimes think that my memory works like the veins of coal under Illinois, shallow at the near end, shallow at the far end and too far down to reach in the middle. I have taken painful things and willed them down the hole, so to speak, sent them away. But I know they’ll come back eventually.

I mean, I reached for a thing today I haven’t touched in twenty-four years. And I recently realized I can picture exactly how T.’s blond stubble sparkled in the sunlight again.

I feel weird. Painfully weird. I think that’s a memory as well, come back to me as real as ever.

You can see why people believe in reincarnation. It feels like everything circles round and round in a life. Why would a life not circle round itself?