So like me, yet not like me. It’s amazing sometimes the things you lose. Other memories stay, like a burr caught in your mind. The sound the furnace makes when it kicks on in a darkened house. It’s a feeling you get—like a trance, family sleeping down the hall—and it’s like everything at that moment is right, and always will be—one random moment when everything is good. And other memories, too. The mirror in your parent’s bedroom, constructed of foot-wide rectangles glued to the wall, and when you look it is a broken boy looking back. A child of edges, a dozen discrete boxes, all slightly out of alignment, and you can move your feet slightly to adjust the angle at which you’re viewed, so that your face is neatly in one mirror and your shoulder in another and your arms another, a complete compartmentalization of your being. And another memory: Sitting up at night by the window, waiting for your father to walk through the door. Your mother coming in. “What’s wrong?”
