Cleaning up my laptop

 I found these notes from a book I read in 2023.  I am not sure how or when this person was peering over my shoulder.  I do not recall their shadow.  And while I remember the title, I don't think I remember these passages.  Haunting.  As a Ghost Club should be.

                The Saturday Night Ghost Club by Craig Davidson 2018

                           Read 10-17-23

 

In the hallway of a hospital two hundred miles from my childhood home.  I stood cradling the most precious object I would ever hold—a child I already loved more than he would ever be capable of loving me back—as scared as I’d ever been.  It wasn’t the fear I’d known as a boy: that onrushing smash-cut terror of a monster leaping from a closet.   This was the gnawing fear of possibility, the creeping fear of consequence.

Don’t do this.  I remember this plea, though I cannot say who or what I was sending it out to.  Not to our baby boy.  Do it to me.  Hurt me, wreck me, take everything from me.

And all the time, I knew the world is resistant to bargains of that nature.

 

Reality never changes.  Only our recollections of it do.  Whenever a moment passes, we pass along with it into the realm of memory.  And in that realm, geometries change.   Contours shift, shades lighten, objectivities dissolve.  Memory becomes what we need it to be.

 

I navigate the storerooms of a patient’s consciousness, passing memories in their golden vaults, my wand clumsily bayoneting—it often seems—the pink jelly that holds everything the patient is or will ever be.  Hard as I try not to disturb the furniture, things happen.  I am forced to accept these tragic outcomes for the same reason that the patients on my table must accept their own lot: we are only human, a condition of perpetual uncertainty and failure.