Sometime just before Christmas.

I doubt y'all are still reading this.

==

It's strange waking up here, in this room. The room is the room where I was born 25 years ago. I wake late in the afternoon and lie in bed, watching the December sun stalking low in the sky. I duck my head a bit to stare into the sun - it's white, it's hot.

I suppose could trace how I got back here, in three-stairs-at-a-time leaps - something like my memory's version of "she swallowed the spider to catch the fly" - but memory doesn't work like that. I lie in bed and give answers to trivia questions I was asked years ago, celebrating my correct answers and correcting my failures. I'm thinking of Moose Group. I wander mentally over to my apartment in San Francisco, and look up out the windows - I had a fifth floor apartment, and I could see blue sky from bed, through bay windows. I hear Amy knocking on the door; why didn't she come to San Francisco more often? I was dreaming that she had wrote a book, and one of the chapters was titled "Ben".

This is where I live most of my life. Actually, we all live most of our lives in the past - your only choice is to pick how recent you want your past to be. Getting older is obviously a complete drag, I'm tired of fighting gravity and losing. But I do have this to look forward to: as my past stretches out I will be able to lie in memory more and more, and the old memories will become even hazier than they are now, and the beautiful ones will be cherry-picked and held up like trophies.

I'm lost even now, in how I met Angie, the summer after my father died. How she was sitting on the porch railing, propped up against a wooden post, watching the party sideways. How she asked me for a cigarette, and then never asked again. The "Angie memory video" plays out somewhat linearly, and ends poorly: I leave, she cries. I'm hoping time will erase most of it, and concentrate the affair down to the night we met.