Past-Lives Therapy

I am vomiting, the two-year-old me is: but I clutch my father’s tree-root thumb: it cannot let me fall. Objection; the one-year-old me-ba by gavels his spoon on a highchair tray. Touch, touch once again: the canvas of my infant bath: soft, yet resolute, a rock-beaten animal hide. Ga-lump: child-intimidating noise: our dumbwaiter as it stumbles up the shaft to exact a payment in kind. I duck behind my mother: its ropes are moist: it has risen from the sea. A beautiful hay-blonde teenager, Grace—that word has always, in part, meant her—will lean over my carriage to smile. “How old are you now, how old are you now?” The Lady in Blue sings with a fine appropriateness here, swung round on my old short-play phonograph. Am I two, three? Where is the curator of my past?

There are so many frames in a life: what absurdist has cut and edited mine to document that instance of vomiting, that peevish tantrum with a spoon? Not extraordinary moments, yet stored for quick reference on top: as if they could represent, by their commonness, all that is indiscriminate in living.