Three Oh Eight

The vintage clock flips its last number from seven to eight on the nightstand. Electrical currents and the messages they carry shift too subtly for you to wake. If a doctor were here with sticky electrodes attached to your scalp and red and blue wires braiding away toward a screen, they would call this a seizure. But you do not know this, and there are no doctors around to know that they need to check.

If you were awake, you would notice the involuntary tensing and flexing of unbeckoned muscles. Your eyes would lose focus as they rolled in unpredictable directions. You would notice that your bladder lost control, and you would not attribute it to the nighttime incontinence that you have had since you turned eighty. But these motions are still subtle, and very few could tell them from the reflexive movements within a vivid dream. Even if your husband were still alive, he couldn’t tell this event from a nightmare while sleeping with his arm draped across you.

Charged pulses follow ferning circuits of memory, opting for a path of least resistance. You don’t store things the way they do in libraries, by alphabet or topic. Instead, a certain shade of blue is connected to the trip you had on your thirtieth wedding anniversary in Greece. The name of a band connects you to driving circles around the block to coax a fussy baby back to sleep.

It prunes from the edges, disconnecting the terminal memories of circuits, the culs-de-sac of a train of thought. Tonight, it snips your access to the name of your neighbor’s ex-husband, the word table, the taste of your grandmother’s chicken and dumplings recipe and the texture of the raised scar on your dead husband’s left thumb.

A connection is cut to the name of the cedar waxwing, a favorite bird in your backyard. But you love them too much, in too many ways, to forget them. You have planted trellises of honeysuckle in your yard to coax flocks of them to visit- the ones with red berries, not the Japanese ones with orange berries. You did this because they are the waxwings' favorites and because the orange berries will change the color of the proud scarlet bands on their wings. You are always listening for the chooble-dee and zeee-zeee-zeee of their calls when you are outside in the spring and summer. These are hub memories, with tendrils spread wide throughout your brain, connected through fascination, information and the duties needed to tend to your yard and attract as many desirable species as possible. It will not leave your mind quite so easily.

The current nibbles at connections to feelings based on unprocessed memories, too. You won’t remember to be unexplainably anxious every time you see someone drive away on a motorcycle. Slugs will cease to be disgusting. You won’t crave popcorn each time you hear something that reminds you of The Wizard of Oz.

The last digit on your alarm clock will flip to nine a few seconds after the episode ends. There will not be fanfare. You will not even awaken. You will simply roll over and begin dreaming about the amusement park near Lake Erie that you used to visit as a child.

Tomorrow morning, you will not know what went missing this night, or that anything changed at all. This will not be enough for your daughter to notice a difference when she calls you to meet up for lunch. The disconnected thoughts, these parts of you, will not disappear. They will simply sit on the other side of a new chasm, patiently waiting to be rediscovered.