It sometimes gets so I can’t tell a memory from a daydream, can’t tell if a memory is from yesterday or twenty years ago, can’t tell if any of this is actually happening at all. I write the word ‘sometimes’ in my notebook so many times it starts to look like it’s spelt incorrectly. So strong is my suspicion that it is wrong, I reach for a dictionary to look it up. There, at home on the page, in beautiful, bold black on white, it still looks peculiar.
I get up and make myself a drink; two fingers of Scotch. Not the good stuff – the stuff I save for when guests are over – but the okay stuff, the stuff I save for when I’m sure I’m losing my mind. I don’t sip, I drink, and it’s gone it three gulps, burning all the way down to my core. I feel better. It’s afternoon, and I’ve yet to pull the curtains back to reveal the outside world. Outside, a cold, grey sky meets a cold, grey ground. I can’t bare it. My cozy study, it’s dark but for a small lamp throwing dim light into my armchair. I balance the empty whiskey glass on the tips of my fingers. I close my notebook.
A gentle rustling comes from my bedroom, someone twisting in the sheets, waking up. There’s a stretch, a yawn. It sometimes gets so I don’t know if any of this is real. I hear her call my name, a voice smooth in timbre, pleasant in tone. “Hello?” she calls out. “You around?” That feeling you have after a night of drinking: like you’ve gone and misplaced your soul. You feel a little lost, a bit out of order, slightly out of time. She calls my name again, and I can’t quite place the voice.
“I’m here,” I tell her, “in the next room. I awoke with a thought, and had to write it down, sort some things out.” I set my glass on the end table, and place my notebook beside it. I can still taste the Scotch on my lips, can still feel the slight burn in my throat.
“Why don’t you come back to bed,” she suggests. I hear her roll over, pulling the covers up. She fluffs the pillow. “This is the kind of day I know we wouldn’t regret wasting on our backs.”
That voice. Familiar, yet foreign, it simultaneously invites me to stay and inspires me to flee. I swear it sometimes gets so I can’t tell if a memory is recent or from decades past. I shake my head. “I’ll be there soon,” I say. “Just finishing something up.”
From the next room, I hear a click of the bedside lamp followed by slender fingers flipping through a magazine. “I’ll be here,” she sighs.
And I know she will be. More to myself than anyone else, I mutter, “Just need to finish up is all.” There’s always something to finish up. Picking up my notebook, I turn to the page where I left off and write ‘sometimes’ once more. Twice more. Again. I continue writing that word repeatedly until it looks like alien scrawl. Sometimes it gets so I can’t tell a memory from a daydream, real past from re-imagined past, the figments from the fragments.
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