36. Sleepwalking

By God if this house isn’t booby-trapped! Hair-triggers everywhere just waiting to be tripped. A certain smell, a song on the radio, a word repeating in my head - can throw a switch that makes memories run in dream-sequence looking like half-remembered recently-discovered old home movies. Like being taken by the hand down a long forgotten lane. When it happens, a warm drowsiness slips over me like a woollen mitten and I head for the solace of bed. To find myself (or lose myself, depending on factors I struggle to control), to seek the security of pillows, the place I rest this fractured head.
.
There’s no place like home.

.

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It’s been happening more frequently these past few days. Happened again yesterday afternoon in Judy’s room. Went in to feed Fred and was dragged headfirst into a waking/standing stupor. A familiarly sweet smell was the trigger this time - froze me to the spot for the briefest moment - felt like fireworks all the colors of the rainbow going off behind my eyes. And I remember thinking
.
Uh-oh, there they are, Past’s stretchyfingers reaching into the present.
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The scent was Judy.
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On the dressing table, amidst countless colourful cosmetic containers that completely covered the counter-top, I spied a small bottle of perfume: Anais Anais. Oxygen and Gravity conspired together to make me sit down and, standing no longer an option, I dropped to her bed and found myself back at
.
That Night.
In the hospital.
.
Buried face in her pillows but couldn’t escape the image, a frame from a film noir, perfectly (perversely, too, maybe) preserved in Time:

.

My father’s hand

holding a cup of steaming espresso

violently trembling

shaking in a kind of Morse Code

I cannot decipher

.

.

It still hasn’t ended
.
That night
she keeps dying
in my head