Day 8 of antibiotics. They work. It’s a wonder though. The first round didn’t do anything except prolong my agony. These are working. The sinus headache is almost history. It’s still there a wee bit but rapidly fading.
A life is like the layers of an onion. Each day, each experience is yet another layer. The layers build up steadily and constantly. Things that are further back in time are living within the deeper layers. We think we have forgotten, and then, quite suddenly they pop into our awareness. Some association with that earlier person, place or thing will happen and up from the layers a memory will come; shiny new, as crystal clear as the day we lived it; or faded and scratched like a one hundred year old photograph.
Unlike an onion, the mind is like a holograph; all parts are contained in the smallest part. All memories are contained in each memory. They all lead eventually to each other.
Some are more difficult to reach
Yet with the right wind
Or an exact scent
In a blink of an eye
They will find you again
When the clouds and winds of October come, I am reminded of hospital green corridors and the smell of iodine soap, and clear, crisp October days. First, when Wilson was struck by AIDS in October 1986, and more recently when my father’s battle with cancer was reaching its climax in October two years ago. When the winds pick up and rustle the leaves, I remember these men; Wilson beginning his departure, my father ending his. They are one and the same loss; the loss of a dearly loved person that will live forever in the mind; their smiles, their tears, their laughter, their joys and sufferings. Their love; and the emptiness that fills the places they used to fill. I miss them, yet in a split second they are entirely with me again…unexpectedly, in moments of reverie, fully alive within the hologram of my mind; we are together again.
So the day begins…in daydreams of my dead people.
