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Parade | Mar 05 2003

I’m sick again. I believe it’s the fourth time this winter. I’ve never gotten sick this much before.

Also, I’m almost out of toilet paper. I use toilet paper to blow my nose, and I’m down to perhaps a tenth of a roll. I could go out and buy more, the market isn’t far, but I’m afraid it would make me sicker.

I might have this wrong, I’m by no means a physicist, but I believe that light quanta can have only certain specific energy levels. When electrons switch between levels, a packet of energy is emitted or absorbed whose frequency is proportional to the energy difference between the two levels. This is quantum theory, and I don’t pretend to understand it.

Still, I thought of it today to describe what’s happened to me. I’ve gotten older. We don’t age in a steady, continuous progression, but in discreet jumps, like the way electrons switch between levels. I’ve made a jump recently and am older than I was.

I had an affair with a much younger woman. Her body reminded me of the body of a woman I dated in 1984. I had forgotten what breasts like that were like. Oddly it made me sad. It’s not 1984 anymore. Not that I would want it to be 1984, but to be with this woman confused me. It felt like some kind of cheating, and a not particularly effective kind at that.

When I look ahead, I see something I’ve never seen before. I see myself on my knees, on my back, humbled by loss. A parade of losses approach. I’ve always known this, it’s part of the deal, but until now these losses have been off in the distance, an abstraction to be dealt with when the time comes.

That time is fast approaching. I can see it and feel it, and this is why I’m sick.