I love the scent of Bengay. These mentholated smells are beguiling. I apply the ointment to my shoulder and arms, then cover myself with the comforter and feel transported in a cold-hot atmosphere. Like fire on ice.
But I ought not to love it so much that I mistake it for toothpaste as I did yesterday.
“Do you know you are absent-minded?” a friend asked.
“Hmm…yes, sort of…okay, I know.”
“Do you know what happens?”
Was this the right moment to discuss? The dark twilight vista was spread around me. Should I be getting visions or be confronted with myself?
I sat there smiling - partly from knowing and partly from seeing myself from another’s eyes.
“You are holding conversations or listening and suddenly you are lost…you seem to have gone to a different place, a different thought and then when you ‘come back’ you snap…”
“Snap out?” I asked.
“No, you snap at whoever is with you.”
I flickered like a candle in the wind -- or was it the candle doing the flickering?
Where did I transport myself to in those ‘absent’ moments? I know I get ideas suddenly, line leap out at me and like windy whiplashes I shut my eyes and inhale-exhale with internal fury. I think when I ‘return’, those moments remain with me and having forgotten who/what I was with, I snap.
I am not like that in normal times. But I have no clear concept of what is normal…and most certainly not of Time.
The contradiction is that I am a stickler for punctuality. It is as though I have to reach somewhere before I go away…
