while the brain is otherwise occupied

When I can’t sleep, which is often, I use my phone to toggle back and forth between reading my Twitter stream and playing Bookworm.

It is in Bookworm that my mind is free from up-to-the-minute worry, so it chooses decades-old worry instead. And I really wouldn’t call it worry. The word game is accessing parts of my brain that contain old memories, and I find myself wondering stuff like what happened to my relationship with my friend Jason. He and I used to talk regularly, I visited him (and his girlfriend) annually in California. Something happened, I’m not sure what. The last time we spoke was about three years ago, and the time before that had been about 18 months. I caught up to him by calling from an unfamiliar cell phone number (you know that trick) and his answering let me know he’d been screening my calls for more than a year. I could speculate what may have ruined us, but I should save the energy for my marathon insomniac Bookworm sessions.

I also think about my grandfather. The touch of his skin against mine as he held my hand on the couch while we watched TV together. The sound of his light snoring as he fell asleep while we watched TV together. For years, it cracked me up to see him jump up as though he’d been awake all along, grab his keys, then rush out the door heading to an unidentified board meeting. Sometimes, I would wait for him to come back home before I left, but my grandmother was always worried about me driving the 40 miles to my place in the dark. Yes, I was 25, 30, 35 years old, but she was grandma, and you know how that goes.

Sometimes, I find myself in the grocery store on this one specific aisle with a 30-second loop of that one particular trip playing in my head. It’s before Ehren was born and while Q was here. It was a microcosmic foreshadowing of a few events I’ve been trying to work out, and it’s been looping for a year. I should start taking notes: does it come right before I’m about to lay out a 10,000-point word or right before I’m about to burn down my library? Medical science wants to know.