anamnesis

it was the shampoo.

some drugstore thing, green bottle,

the kind that costs $2.49 and smells exactly

like 1981 —

and just like that, standing in the shower

at fifty-six years old,

I am twelve again,

hair still dripping,

eyes closed, soap everywhere,

absolutely certain the summer

will never end.

this is what the body does

when you aren’t watching —

it updates the record.

files everything:

the exact temperature of a grandmother’s kitchen,

the particular silence of a Sunday morning in May,

the way creek water smells

in the hour before a storm,

and holds them

until some stray molecule

floats past the nose

and blows the whole vault open.

I have been sitting with this all week

out here at the lake —

Branson just over the ridge,

which is now a whole other thing than it used to be:

my brain catching that childhood wonder resonating

as we sat in folding chairs…

drop ceiling, carpet over concrete;

Rosie and Darrell and Randy hooting it up

the memories so thick I can almost touch them

all of them still resonating over the mountaintops…

some mornings

the light hits the water

at exactly the old angle

and for a half-second

everything is the same as before.

I reconnected with an old friend last month.

we were ten and eleven

when we met

right now, it seems like the last time this mattered,

riding bikes in the kind of loops

that had no destination,

just the pure pointless joy

of momentum and a summer afternoon.

we had Star Wars figures —

the good ones, with the tiny guns

that his mother refused to let outside

because they could be lost,

which, to be fair,

they absolutely would have been —

so we sat in the ruts of dirt

and made the sounds ourselves,

two boys supplying their own

special effects,

utterly convinced

this was enough.

and it was.

god, it was.

here is what I have been thinking about:

the brain does not overwrite.

there is no palimpsest,

no old layer scraped clean

to make room for the new —

it just keeps adding pages,

and the early ones

go further down in the stack

but never disappear,

just wait

for the right shampoo,

the right angle of light,

the right song on the wrong station,

to surface again

absolutely intact.

I think about my grandmother’s house

the way you think about a restaurant that closed in 1995

that you can no longer visit —

the smell of it specifically,

something with cinnamon in it,

something with old wood,

something that I have never been able

to locate in the actual world

since she died,

and yet my body knows it

on contact,

the way a key knows

its own lock.

this week I have made new memories.

the way the dock creaks at 6am.

a heron standing perfectly still

in the reeds like he has tenure.

coffee going cold in my hand

while the fog burns off.

these will go into the stack too,

settle in beside the bikes

and the dirt and the tiny guns

and the green shampoo bottle

and my grandmother’s kitchen

and the summer I was certain

would never end —

and someday,

from some shower I have not yet stood in,

in some year I cannot see from here,

the smell of lake water at dawn

will open a door

and I will be standing on this dock

again,

fifty-six,

coffee cold now,

certain of nothing

and everything,

that same heron still

in the reeds.